linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] locking/mutex: Rewrite basic mutex

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Date:   Tue, 23 Aug 2016 22:41:36 +0200
From:   Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:     Waiman Long <waiman.long@....com>
Cc:     Jason Low <jason.low2@....com>,
        Davidlohr Bueso <dave@...olabs.net>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Ding Tianhong <dingtianhong@...wei.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Will Deacon <Will.Deacon@....com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        Imre Deak <imre.deak@...el.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@...ux.intel.com>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ibm.com>, jason.low2@...com,
        chris@...is-wilson.co.uk
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] locking/mutex: Rewrite basic mutex

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 03:36:17PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> I think this is the right way to go. There isn't any big change in the
> slowpath, so the contended performance should be the same. The fastpath,
> however, will get a bit slower as a single atomic op plus a jump instruction
> (a single cacheline load) is replaced by a read-and-test and compxchg
> (potentially 2 cacheline loads) which will be somewhat slower than the
> optimized assembly code.

Yeah, I'll try and run some workloads tomorrow if you and Jason don't
beat me to it ;-)

> Alternatively, you can replace the
> __mutex_trylock() in mutex_lock() by just a blind cmpxchg to optimize the
> fastpath further. 

Problem with that is that we need to preserve the flag bits, so we need
the initial load.

Or were you thinking of: cmpxchg(&lock->owner, 0UL, (unsigned
long)current), which only works on uncontended locks?

> A cmpxhcg will still be a tiny bit slower than other
> atomic ops, but it will be more acceptable, I think.

I don't think cmpxchg is much slower than say xadd or xchg, the typical
problem with cmpxchg is the looping part, but single instruction costs
should be similar.

> BTW, I got the following compilation warning when I tried your patch:
> 
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c: In function ‘mutex_is_locked_by’:
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c:44:22: error: invalid operands to
> binary == (have ‘atomic_long_t’ and ‘struct task_struct *’)
> return mutex->owner == task;
> ^
> CC [M] drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_psr.o
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c:49:1: warning: control reaches end
> of non-void function [-Wreturn-type]
> }
> ^
> make[4]: *** [drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.o] Error 1
> 
> Apparently, you may need to look to see if there are other direct access of
> the owner field in the other code.

AArggghh.. that is horrible horrible code.

It tries to do a recursive mutex and pokes at the innards of the mutex.
that so deserves to break.