Re: [PATCH] lockref: Limit number of cmpxchg loop retries

Jan Glauber
2019-06-06T08:03:41Z

On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 01:16:46PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 6:49 AM Jan Glauber <jglauber@cavium.com> wrote:
> >
> > Add an upper bound to the loop to force the fallback to spinlocks
> > after some time. A retry value of 100 should not impact any hardware
> > that does not have this issue.
> >
> > With the retry limit the performance of an open-close testcase
> > improved between 60-70% on ThunderX2.
>
> Btw, did you do any kind of performance analysis across different
> retry limit values?

I tried 15/50/100/200/500, results were largely identical up to 100.
For SMT=4 a higher retry value might be better, but unless we can add a
sysctl value 100 looked like a good compromise to me.

--Jan

> I'm perfectly happy to just pick a random number and '100' looks fine
> to me, so this is mainly out of curiosity.
>
> Linus