Re: Linux spin lock enhancement on xen

[Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@eu.citrix.com>]

On 24/08/2010 09:08, "George Dunlap" <dunlapg@umich.edu> wrote:

> Jeremy, do you think that changes to the HV are necessary, or do you
> think that the existing solution is sufficient?  It seems to me like
> hinting to the HV to do a directed yield makes more sense than making
> the same thing happen via blocking and event channels.  OTOH, that
> gives the guest a lot more control over when and how things happen.
> 
> Mukesh, did you see the patch by Xiantao Zhang a few days ago,
> regarding what to do on an HVM pause instruction?

I think there's a difference between providing some kind of yield_to as a
private interafce within the hypervisor as some kind of heuristic for
emulating something like PAUSE, versus providing such an operation as a
public guest interface.

It seems to me that Jeremy's spinlock implementation provides all the info a
scheduler would require: vcpus trying to acquire a lock are blocked, the
lock holder wakes just the next vcpu in turn when it releases the lock. The
scheduler at that point may have a decision to make as to whether to run the
lock releaser, or the new lock holder, or both, but how can the guest help
with that when its a system-wide scheduling decision? Obviously the guest
would presumably like all its runnable vcpus to run all of the time!

 - Keir

>  I thought the
> solution he had was interesting: when yielding due to a spinlock,
> rather than going to the back of the queue, just go behind one person.
>  I think an impleentation of "yield_to" that might make sense in the
> credit scheduler is:
> * Put the yielding vcpu behind one cpu
> * If the yield-to vcpu is not running, pull it to the front within its
> priority.  (I.e., if it's UNDER, put it at the front so it runs next;
> if it's OVER, make it the first OVER cpu.)