Re: [PATCH v5 1/3] locking/rwsem: Remove arch specific rwsem files

Waiman Long
2019-03-22T17:24:10Z

On 03/22/2019 01:01 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 7:30 AM Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> wrote:
>> 19 files changed, 133 insertions(+), 930 deletions(-)
> Lovely. And it all looks sane to me.
>
> So ack.
>
> The only comment I have is about __down_read_trylock(), which probably
> isn't critical enough to actually care about, but:
>
>> +static inline int __down_read_trylock(struct rw_semaphore *sem)
>> +{
>> + long tmp;
>> +
>> + while ((tmp = atomic_long_read(&sem->count)) >= 0) {
>> + if (tmp == atomic_long_cmpxchg_acquire(&sem->count, tmp,
>> + tmp + RWSEM_ACTIVE_READ_BIAS)) {
>> + return 1;
>> + }
>> + }
>> + return 0;
>> +}
> So this seems to
>
> (a) read the line early (the whole cacheline in shared state issue)
>
> (b) read the line again unnecessarily in the while loop
>
> Now, (a) might be explained by "well, maybe we do trylock even with
> existing readers", although I continue to think that the case we
> should optimize for is simply the uncontended one, where we don't even
> have multiple readers.
>
> But (b) just seems silly.
>
> So I wonder if it shouldn't just be
>
> long tmp = 0;
>
> do {
> long new = atomic_long_cmpxchg_acquire(&sem->count, tmp,
> tmp + RWSEM_ACTIVE_READ_BIAS);
> if (likely(new == tmp))
> return 1;
> tmp = new;
> } while (tmp >= 0);
> return 0;
>
> which would seem simpler and solve both issues. Hmm?
>
> But honestly, I didn't check what our uses of down_read_trylock() look
> like. We have more of them than I expected, and I _think_ the normal
> case is the "nobody else holds the lock", but that's just a gut
> feeling.
>
> Some of them _might_ be performance-critical. There's the one on
> mmap_sem in the fault handling path, for example. And yes, I'd expect
> the normal case to very much be "no other readers or writers" for that
> one.
>
> NOTE! The above code snippet is absolutely untested, and might be
> completely wrong. Take it as a "something like this" rather than
> anything else.
>
> Linus

As you have noticed already, this patch is just for moving code around
without changing it. I optimize __down_read_trylock() in patch 3.

Cheers,
Longman