[PATCH v5 10/18] locking/rwsem: Wake up almost all readers in wait queue

Waiman Long
2019-04-18T23:47:16Z

When the front of the wait queue is a reader, other readers
immediately following the first reader will also be woken up at the
same time. However, if there is a writer in between. Those readers
behind the writer will not be woken up.

Because of optimistic spinning, the lock acquisition order is not FIFO
anyway. The lock handoff mechanism will ensure that lock starvation
will not happen.

Assuming that the lock hold times of the other readers still in the
queue will be about the same as the readers that are being woken up,
there is really not much additional cost other than the additional
latency due to the wakeup of additional tasks by the waker. Therefore
all the readers up to a maximum of 256 in the queue are woken up when
the first waiter is a reader to improve reader throughput. This is
somewhat similar in concept to a phase-fair R/W lock.

With a locking microbenchmark running on 5.1 based kernel, the total
locking rates (in kops/s) on a 8-socket IvyBridge-EX system with
equal numbers of readers and writers before and after this patch were
as follows:

# of Threads Pre-Patch Post-patch
------------ --------- ----------
4 1,641 1,674
8 731 1,062
16 564 924
32 78 300
64 38 195
240 50 149

There is no performance gain at low contention level. At high contention
level, however, this patch gives a pretty decent performance boost.

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
---
kernel/locking/rwsem.c | 26 +++++++++++++++++++++++---
1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/kernel/locking/rwsem.c b/kernel/locking/rwsem.c
index 97c4e92482be..76c380b63b0c 100644
--- a/kernel/locking/rwsem.c
+++ b/kernel/locking/rwsem.c
@@ -254,6 +254,14 @@ enum writer_wait_state {
*/
#define RWSEM_WAIT_TIMEOUT DIV_ROUND_UP(HZ, 250)

+/*
+ * Magic number to batch-wakeup waiting readers, even when writers are
+ * also present in the queue. This both limits the amount of work the
+ * waking thread must do and also prevents any potential counter overflow,
+ * however unlikely.
+ */
+#define MAX_READERS_WAKEUP 0x100
+
/*
* handle the lock release when processes blocked on it that can now run
* - if we come here from up_xxxx(), then the RWSEM_FLAG_WAITERS bit must
@@ -328,16 +336,22 @@ static void __rwsem_mark_wake(struct rw_semaphore *sem,
}

/*
- * Grant an infinite number of read locks to the readers at the front
- * of the queue. We know that woken will be at least 1 as we accounted
+ * Grant up to MAX_READERS_WAKEUP read locks to all the readers in the
+ * queue. We know that the woken will be at least 1 as we accounted
* for above. Note we increment the 'active part' of the count by the
* number of readers before waking any processes up.
+ *
+ * This is an adaptation of the phase-fair R/W locks where at the
+ * reader phase (first waiter is a reader), all readers are eligible
+ * to acquire the lock at the same time irrespective of their order
+ * in the queue. The writers acquire the lock according to their
+ * order in the queue.
*/
list_for_each_entry_safe(waiter, tmp, &sem->wait_list, list) {
struct task_struct *tsk;

if (waiter->type == RWSEM_WAITING_FOR_WRITE)
- break;
+ continue;

woken++;
tsk = waiter->task;
@@ -356,6 +370,12 @@ static void __rwsem_mark_wake(struct rw_semaphore *sem,
* after setting the reader waiter to nil.
*/
wake_q_add_safe(wake_q, tsk);
+
+ /*
+ * Limit # of readers that can be woken up per wakeup call.
+ */
+ if (woken >= MAX_READERS_WAKEUP)
+ break;
}

adjustment = woken * RWSEM_READER_BIAS - adjustment;
--
2.18.1