linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: silence soft lockups from unlock

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Message-ID: <CAHk-=wihTRHMm1LC4AfidZptT9ZuT-wBjE2VhYzKBy66e4iwQw@mail.gmail.com>
Date:   Thu, 6 Aug 2020 11:32:20 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
Cc:     Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@...ux.intel.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: silence soft lockups from unlock_page

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 11:00 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org> wrote:
>
> It wasn't clear to me whether Hugh thought it was an improvement or
> not that trylock was now less likely to jump the queue.  There're
> the usual "fair is the opposite of throughput" kind of arguments.

Yeah, it could go either way. But on the whole, if the lock bit is
getting any contention, I think we'd rather have it be fair for
latency reasons.

That said, I'm not convinced about my patch, and I actually threw it
away without even testing it (sometimes I keep patches around in my
private tree for testing, and they can live there for months or even
years when I wonder if they are worth it, but this time I didn't
bother to go to the trouble).

If somebody is interested in pursuing this, I think that patch might
be a good starting point (and it _might_ even work), but it seemed to
be too subtle to really worry about unless somebody finds an actual
acute reason for it.

I think the existing patch narrowing the window is good, and it
clearly didn't hurt throughput (although that was almost certainly for
other reasons).

                Linus