Date:   Tue,  7 Nov 2017 16:18:06 -0500
From:   Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        Juergen Gross <jgross@...e.com>,
        Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@...hat.com>,
        Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@...cle.com>,
        Eduardo Valentin <eduval@...zon.com>,
        Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
Subject: [PATCH v2] locking/pvqspinlock: Hybrid PV queued/unfair locks

Currently, all the lock waiters entering the slowpath will do one
lock stealing attempt to acquire the lock. That helps performance,
especially in VMs with over-committed vCPUs. However, the current
pvqspinlocks still don't perform as good as unfair locks in many cases.
On the other hands, unfair locks do have the problem of lock starvation
that pvqspinlocks don't have.

This patch combines the best attributes of an unfair lock and a
pvqspinlock into a hybrid lock with 2 modes - queued mode & unfair
mode. A lock waiter goes into the unfair mode when there are waiters
in the wait queue but the pending bit isn't set. Otherwise, it will
go into the queued mode waiting in the queue for its turn.

On a 2-socket 36-core E5-2699 v3 system (HT off), a kernel build
(make -j<n>) was done in a VM with unpinned vCPUs 3 times with the
best time selected and <n> is the number of vCPUs available. The build
times of the original pvqspinlock, hybrid pvqspinlock and unfair lock
with various number of vCPUs are as follows:

  vCPUs    pvqlock     hybrid pvqlock    unfair lock
  -----    -------     --------------    -----------
    30      342.1s         329.1s          329.1s
    36      314.1s         305.3s          307.3s
    45      345.0s         302.1s          306.6s
    54      365.4s         308.6s          307.8s
    72      358.9s         293.6s          303.9s
   108      343.0s         285.9s          304.2s

The hybrid pvqspinlock performs better or comparable to the unfair
lock.

By turning on QUEUED_LOCK_STAT, the table below showed the number
of lock acquisitions in unfair mode and queue mode after a kernel
build with various number of vCPUs.

  vCPUs    queued mode  unfair mode
  -----    -----------  -----------
    30      9,130,518      294,954
    36     10,856,614      386,809
    45      8,467,264   11,475,373
    54      6,409,987   19,670,855
    72      4,782,063   25,712,180

It can be seen that as the VM became more and more over-committed,
the ratio of locks acquired in unfair mode increases. This is all
done automatically to get the best overall performance as possible.

Using a kernel locking microbenchmark with number of locking
threads equals to the number of vCPUs available on the same machine,
the minimum, average and maximum (min/avg/max) numbers of locking
operations done per thread in a 5-second testing interval are shown
below:

  vCPUs         hybrid pvqlock             unfair lock
  -----         --------------             -----------
    36     822,135/881,063/950,363    75,570/313,496/  690,465
    54     542,435/581,664/625,937    35,460/204,280/  457,172
    72     397,500/428,177/499,299    17,933/150,679/  708,001
   108     257,898/288,150/340,871     3,085/181,176/1,257,109

It can be seen that the hybrid pvqspinlocks are more fair and
performant than the unfair locks in this test.

The table below shows the kernel build times on a smaller 2-socket
16-core 32-thread E5-2620 v4 system.

  vCPUs    pvqlock     hybrid pvqlock    unfair lock
  -----    -------     --------------    -----------
    16      436.8s         433.4s          435.6s
    36      366.2s         364.8s          364.5s
    48      423.6s         376.3s          370.2s
    64      433.1s         376.6s          376.8s

Again, the performance of the hybrid pvqspinlock was comparable to
that of the unfair lock.

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
---
 v1->v2:
  - Rename function to pv_hybrid_queued_unfair_trylock().
  - Expand the comment to add more information on how it works.
  - Add test in the commit log about fairness of pvqspinlocks vs.
    unfair locks.

 kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h | 47 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
 1 file changed, 38 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

diff --git a/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h b/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h
index 4355568..8d95bf7 100644
--- a/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h
+++ b/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h
@@ -60,21 +60,50 @@ struct pv_node {
 #include "qspinlock_stat.h"
 
 /*
+ * Hybrid PV queued/unfair lock
+ *
  * By replacing the regular queued_spin_trylock() with the function below,
  * it will be called once when a lock waiter enter the PV slowpath before
- * being queued. By allowing one lock stealing attempt here when the pending
- * bit is off, it helps to reduce the performance impact of lock waiter
- * preemption without the drawback of lock starvation.
+ * being queued.
+ *
+ * The pending bit is set by the queue head vCPU of the MCS wait queue in
+ * pv_wait_head_or_lock() to signal that it is ready to spin on the lock.
+ * When that bit becomes visible to the incoming waiters, no lock stealing
+ * is allowed. The function will return immediately to make the waiters
+ * enter the MCS wait queue. So lock starvation shouldn't happen as long
+ * as the queued mode vCPUs are actively running to set the pending bit
+ * and hence disabling lock stealing.
+ *
+ * When the pending bit isn't set, the lock waiters will stay in the unfair
+ * mode spinning on the lock unless the MCS wait queue is empty. In this
+ * case, the lock waiters will enter the queued mode slowpath trying to
+ * become the queue head and set the pending bit.
+ *
+ * This hybrid PV queued/unfair lock combines the best attributes of a
+ * queued lock (no lock starvation) and an unfair lock (good performance
+ * on not heavily contended locks).
  */
-#define queued_spin_trylock(l)	pv_queued_spin_steal_lock(l)
-static inline bool pv_queued_spin_steal_lock(struct qspinlock *lock)
+#define queued_spin_trylock(l)	pv_hybrid_queued_unfair_trylock(l)
+static inline bool pv_hybrid_queued_unfair_trylock(struct qspinlock *lock)
 {
 	struct __qspinlock *l = (void *)lock;
 
-	if (!(atomic_read(&lock->val) & _Q_LOCKED_PENDING_MASK) &&
-	    (cmpxchg_acquire(&l->locked, 0, _Q_LOCKED_VAL) == 0)) {
-		qstat_inc(qstat_pv_lock_stealing, true);
-		return true;
+	/*
+	 * Stay in unfair lock mode as long as queued mode waiters are
+	 * present in the MCS wait queue but the pending bit isn't set.
+	 */
+	for (;;) {
+		int val = atomic_read(&lock->val);
+
+		if (!(val & _Q_LOCKED_PENDING_MASK) &&
+		   (cmpxchg_acquire(&l->locked, 0, _Q_LOCKED_VAL) == 0)) {
+			qstat_inc(qstat_pv_lock_stealing, true);
+			return true;
+		}
+		if (!(val & _Q_TAIL_MASK) || (val & _Q_PENDING_MASK))
+			break;
+
+		cpu_relax();
 	}
 
 	return false;
-- 
1.8.3.1

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