linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH] qspinlock: Improve performance by reducing load instruction rollback

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Date:	Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:34:10 +0200
From:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>
Cc:	ling.ma.program@...il.com, mingo@...hat.com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Ma Ling <ling.ml@...baba-inc.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] qspinlock: Improve performance by reducing load
 instruction rollback

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 09:58:23AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * ling.ma.program@...il.com <ling.ma.program@...il.com> wrote:
> 
> > From: Ma Ling <ling.ml@...baba-inc.com>
> > 
> > All load instructions can run speculatively but they have to follow
> > memory order rule in multiple cores as below:
> > _x = _y = 0
> > 
> > Processor 0				Processor 1
> > 
> > mov r1, [ _y]  //M1			mov [ _x], 1  //M3
> > mov r2, [ _x]  //M2			mov [ _y], 1  //M4
> > 
> > If r1 = 1, r2 must be 1
> > 
> > In order to guarantee above rule, although Processor 0 execute
> > M1 and M2 instruction out of order, they are kept in ROB,
> > when load buffer for _x in Processor 0 received the update 
> > message from Processor 1, Processor 0 need to roll back
> > from M2 instruction, which will flush the whole pipeline,
> > the latency is over the penalty from branch prediction miss.
> > 
> > In this patch we use lock cmpxchg instruction to force load
> > instructions to be serialization, the destination operand
> > receives a write cycle without regard to the result of
> > the comparison, which can help us to reduce the penalty
> > from load instruction roll back.
> > 
> > Our experiment indicates the performance can be improved by 10%~15%
> > for 2 and 3 threads cases, the conflicts from lock cache line
> > spend them most of the time.
> 
> So it would be nice to create a new user-space spinlock testing facility, via a 
> new 'perf bench spinlock' feature or so. That way others can test and validate 
> your results on different hardware as well.

So its trivial to lift this code into userspace -- in fact, I have that
somewhere.

The trouble is going to keep them in sync.
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