Re: [PATCH 0/6] Optimize the cpu hotplug locking -v2

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 08 Oct 2013 12:25:05 +0200 Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> 
> > The current cpu hotplug lock is a single global lock; therefore 
> > excluding hotplug is a very expensive proposition even though it is 
> > rare occurrence under normal operation.
> > 
> > There is a desire for a more light weight implementation of 
> > {get,put}_online_cpus() from both the NUMA scheduling as well as the 
> > -RT side.
> > 
> > The current hotplug lock is a full reader preference lock -- and thus 
> > supports reader recursion. However since we're making the read side 
> > lock much cheaper it is the expectation that it will also be used far 
> > more. Which in turn would lead to writer starvation.
> > 
> > Therefore the new lock proposed is completely fair; albeit somewhat 
> > expensive on the write side. This in turn means that we need a 
> > per-task nesting count to support reader recursion.
> 
> This is a lot of code and a lot of new complexity.  It needs some pretty 
> convincing performance numbers to justify its inclusion, no?

Should be fairly straightforward to test: the sys_sched_getaffinity() and 
sys_sched_setaffinity() syscalls both make use of 
get_online_cpus()/put_online_cpus(), so a testcase frobbing affinities on 
N CPUs in parallel ought to demonstrate scalability improvements pretty 
nicely.

[ It's not just about affinities: in particular sys_sched_getaffinity() 
  also gets used as a NR_CPUS runtime detection method in apps, so it 
  matters to regular non-affine loads as well. ]

Thanks,

	Ingo