linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] locking/rwlocks: do not starve writers

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Date:   Fri, 17 Jun 2022 21:25:15 +0200
From:   Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>,
        Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@...il.com>,
        Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>, Roman Penyaev <rpenyaev@...e.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] locking/rwlocks: do not starve writers

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:19 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 2:10 PM Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com> wrote:
> >
> > So I wonder why we replaced eventpoll spinlock with an rwlock.
>
> Yeah, usually we've actually gone the other way.
>
> Spinning rwlocks are seldom a big win, unless you can get some
> secondary indirect win out of them.
>
> That secondary win is often:
>
>  (a) unfairness is usually very good for throughput (iow, the very
> unfairness that you hit may *be* the reason why it looked good in some
> benchmark, and people decided "ok, let's do this").
>
>  (b) the special case of "interrupts take the lock for reading only"
> thing that allows other readers to not disable interrupts
>
> IOW, the win of a spinning rwlock is not necessarily the "we allow
> multiple concurrent readers" that you'd expect, because if you have
> small sections of code you protect, that just isn't a big deal, and
> the costs are in the lock bouncing etc.
>
> It's also worth pointing out that rwlocks are only unfair *if* they
> hit that "reader from (soft)interrupt" case. Which means that such
> cases *really* had better either have very very short locked regions
> (with interrupts disabled), or they really need that (b) part above.
>
> And yes, the tasklist lock really needs the (b) part above. Disabling
> interrupts for task traversal would be completely and entirely
> unacceptable, because the traversal can actually be fairly expensive
> (lots and lots of threads).

Interesting...

 I think getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF) is blocking interrupts in the
possible long loop:

do {
      accumulate_thread_rusage(t, r);
} while_each_thread(p, t);



>
> I suspect eventpoll just did the wrong thing.
>
>               Linus