linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] Convert powerpc simple spinlocks into ticket locks

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Thu, 6 Feb 2014 17:38:37 +0100
From:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:	Torsten Duwe <duwe@....de>
Cc:	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
	Paul Mackerras <paulus@...ba.org>,
	Anton Blanchard <anton@...ba.org>,
	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Convert powerpc simple spinlocks into ticket locks

On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 11:37:37AM +0100, Torsten Duwe wrote:
> x86 has them, MIPS has them, ARM has them, even ia64 has them:
> ticket locks. They reduce memory bus and cache pressure especially
> for contended spinlocks, increasing performance.
> 
> This patch is a port of the x86 spin locks, mostly written in C,
> to the powerpc, introducing inline asm where needed. The pSeries
> directed yield for vCPUs is taken care of by an additional "holder"
> field in the lock.
> 

A few questions; what's with the ppc64 holder thing? Not having a 32bit
spinlock_t is sad.

Can you pair lwarx with sthcx ? I couldn't immediately find the answer
in the PowerISA doc. If so I think you can do better by being able to
atomically load both tickets but only storing the head without affecting
the tail.

In that case you can avoid the ll/sc on unlock, because only the lock
owner can modify the tail, so you can use a single half-word store.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/