This reverts commit bf726eab37, as it has
been reported to cause a regression with processes stuck in __down(),
apparently because some missing wakeup.
Quoth Sven Wegener:
"I'm currently investigating a regression that has showed up with my
last git pull yesterday. Bisecting the commits showed bf726e
"semaphore: fix" to be the culprit, reverting it fixed the issue.
Symptoms: During heavy filesystem usage (e.g. a kernel compile) I get
several compiler processes in uninterruptible sleep, blocking all i/o
on the filesystem. System is an Intel Core 2 Quad running a 64bit
kernel and userspace. Filesystem is xfs on top of lvm. See below for
the output of sysrq-w."
See
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/10/45
for full report.
In the meantime, we can just fix the BKL performance regression by
reverting back to the good old BKL spinlock implementation instead,
since any sleeping lock will generally perform badly, especially if it
tries to be fair.
Reported-by: Sven Wegener <sven.wegener@stealer.net>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Yanmin Zhang reported:
| Comparing with kernel 2.6.25, AIM7 (use tmpfs) has more th
| regression under 2.6.26-rc1 on my 8-core stoakley, 16-core tigerton,
| and Itanium Montecito. Bisect located the patch below:
|
| 64ac24e738 is first bad commit
| commit 64ac24e738
| Author: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>
| Date: Fri Mar 7 21:55:58 2008 -0500
|
| Generic semaphore implementation
|
| After I manually reverted the patch against 2.6.26-rc1 while fixing
| lots of conflicts/errors, aim7 regression became less than 2%.
i reproduced the AIM7 workload and can confirm Yanmin's findings that
-.26-rc1 regresses over .25 - by over 67% here.
Looking at the workload i found and fixed what i believe to be the real
bug causing the AIM7 regression: it was inefficient wakeup / scheduling
/ locking behavior of the new generic semaphore code, causing suboptimal
performance.
The problem comes from the following code. The new semaphore code does
this on down():
spin_lock_irqsave(&sem->lock, flags);
if (likely(sem->count > 0))
sem->count--;
else
__down(sem);
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&sem->lock, flags);
and this on up():
spin_lock_irqsave(&sem->lock, flags);
if (likely(list_empty(&sem->wait_list)))
sem->count++;
else
__up(sem);
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&sem->lock, flags);
where __up() does:
list_del(&waiter->list);
waiter->up = 1;
wake_up_process(waiter->task);
and where __down() does this in essence:
list_add_tail(&waiter.list, &sem->wait_list);
waiter.task = task;
waiter.up = 0;
for (;;) {
[...]
spin_unlock_irq(&sem->lock);
timeout = schedule_timeout(timeout);
spin_lock_irq(&sem->lock);
if (waiter.up)
return 0;
}
the fastpath looks good and obvious, but note the following property of
the contended path: if there's a task on the ->wait_list, the up() of
the current owner will "pass over" ownership to that waiting task, in a
wake-one manner, via the waiter->up flag and by removing the waiter from
the wait list.
That is all and fine in principle, but as implemented in
kernel/semaphore.c it also creates a nasty, hidden source of contention!
The contention comes from the following property of the new semaphore
code: the new owner owns the semaphore exclusively, even if it is not
running yet.
So if the old owner, even if just a few instructions later, does a
down() [lock_kernel()] again, it will be blocked and will have to wait
on the new owner to eventually be scheduled (possibly on another CPU)!
Or if another task gets to lock_kernel() sooner than the "new owner"
scheduled, it will be blocked unnecessarily and for a very long time
when there are 2000 tasks running.
I.e. the implementation of the new semaphores code does wake-one and
lock ownership in a very restrictive way - it does not allow
opportunistic re-locking of the lock at all and keeps the scheduler from
picking task order intelligently.
This kind of scheduling, with 2000 AIM7 processes running, creates awful
cross-scheduling between those 2000 tasks, causes reduced parallelism, a
throttled runqueue length and a lot of idle time. With increasing number
of CPUs it causes an exponentially worse behavior in AIM7, as the chance
for a newly woken new-owner task to actually run anytime soon is less
and less likely.
Note that it takes just a tiny bit of contention for the 'new-semaphore
catastrophy' to happen: the wakeup latencies get added to whatever small
contention there is, and quickly snowball out of control!
I believe Yanmin's findings and numbers support this analysis too.
The best fix for this problem is to use the same scheduling logic that
the kernel/mutex.c code uses: keep the wake-one behavior (that is OK and
wanted because we do not want to over-schedule), but also allow
opportunistic locking of the lock even if a wakee is already "in
flight".
The patch below implements this new logic. With this patch applied the
AIM7 regression is largely fixed on my quad testbox:
# v2.6.25 vanilla:
..................
Tasks Jobs/Min JTI Real CPU Jobs/sec/task
2000 56096.4 91 207.5 789.7 0.4675
2000 55894.4 94 208.2 792.7 0.4658
# v2.6.26-rc1-166-gc0a1811 vanilla:
...................................
Tasks Jobs/Min JTI Real CPU Jobs/sec/task
2000 33230.6 83 350.3 784.5 0.2769
2000 31778.1 86 366.3 783.6 0.2648
# v2.6.26-rc1-166-gc0a1811 + semaphore-speedup:
...............................................
Tasks Jobs/Min JTI Real CPU Jobs/sec/task
2000 55707.1 92 209.0 795.6 0.4642
2000 55704.4 96 209.0 796.0 0.4642
i.e. a 67% speedup. We are now back to within 1% of the v2.6.25
performance levels and have zero idle time during the test, as expected.
Btw., interactivity also improved dramatically with the fix - for
example console-switching became almost instantaneous during this
workload (which after all is running 2000 tasks at once!), without the
patch it was stuck for a minute at times.
There's another nice side-effect of this speedup patch, the new generic
semaphore code got even smaller:
text data bss dec hex filename
1241 0 0 1241 4d9 semaphore.o.before
1207 0 0 1207 4b7 semaphore.o.after
(because the waiter.up complication got removed.)
Longer-term we should look into using the mutex code for the generic
semaphore code as well - but i's not easy due to legacies and it's
outside of the scope of v2.6.26 and outside the scope of this patch as
well.
Bisected-by: "Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Move documentation from semaphore.h to semaphore.c as requested by
Andrew Morton. Also reformat to kernel-doc style and add some more
notes about the implementation.
Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@linux.intel.com>
By removing the negative values of 'count' and relying on the wait_list to
indicate whether we have any waiters, we can simplify the implementation
by removing the protection against an unlikely race condition. Thanks to
David Howells for his suggestions.
Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@linux.intel.com>
ACPI currently emulates a timeout for semaphores with calls to
down_trylock and sleep. This produces horrible behaviour in terms of
fairness and excessive wakeups. Now that we have a unified semaphore
implementation, adding a real down_trylock is almost trivial.
Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@linux.intel.com>
Semaphores are no longer performance-critical, so a generic C
implementation is better for maintainability, debuggability and
extensibility. Thanks to Peter Zijlstra for fixing the lockdep
warning. Thanks to Harvey Harrison for pointing out that the
unlikely() was unnecessary.
Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Linus Torvalds