linux-kernel - RE: [PATCH] lockref: remove cpu

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Message-ID: <3908561D78D1C84285E8C5FCA982C28F31CDC7F7@ORSMSX106.amr.corp.intel.com>
Date:	Thu, 5 Sep 2013 17:35:14 +0000
From:	"Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@...el.com>
To:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@...ibm.com>
CC:	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: RE: [PATCH] lockref: remove cpu_relax() again

> And there can't be any livelock, since by definition somebody else
> _did_ make progress. In fact, adding the cpu_relax() probably just
> makes things much less fair - once somebody else raced on you, the
> cpu_relax() now makes it more likely that _another_ cpu does so too.
>
> That said, let's see Tony's numbers are.

Data from 20 runs of "./t"

3.11 + Linus enabling patches, but ia64 not enabled (commit bc08b449ee14a from Linus tree).
mean 3469553.800000
min 3367709.000000
max 3494154.000000
stddev = 43613.722742

Now add ia64 enabling (including the cpu_relax())
mean 5509067.150000 // nice boost
min 3191639.000000 // worst case is worse than worst case before we made the change
max 6508629.000000
stddev = 793243.943875 // much more variation from run to run

Comment out the cpu_relax()
mean 2185864.400000 // this sucks
min 2141242.000000
max 2286505.000000
stddev = 40847.960152 // but it consistently sucks

So Linus is right that the cpu_relax() makes things less fair ... but without it performance sucks so
much that I don't want to use the clever cmpxchg at all - I'm much better off without it!

This may be caused by Itanium hyper-threading (SOEMT - switch on event multi-threading) where
the spinning thread means that its buddy retires no instructions until h/w times it out and forces
a switch.  But that's just a guess - losing the cacheline to whoever made the change that caused
the cmpxchg to fail should also force a thread switch.

-Tony