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mutex: implement adaptive spinning

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Change mutex contention behaviour such that it will sometimes busy wait on
acquisition - moving its behaviour closer to that of spinlocks.

This concept got ported to mainline from the -rt tree, where it was originally
implemented for rtmutexes by Steven Rostedt, based on work by Gregory Haskins.

Testing with Ingo's test-mutex application (http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/50)
gave a 345% boost for VFS scalability on my testbox:

 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
 avg ops/sec:               296604

 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
 avg ops/sec:               85870

The key criteria for the busy wait is that the lock owner has to be running on
a (different) cpu. The idea is that as long as the owner is running, there is a
fair chance it'll release the lock soon, and thus we'll be better off spinning
instead of blocking/scheduling.

Since regular mutexes (as opposed to rtmutexes) do not atomically track the
owner, we add the owner in a non-atomic fashion and deal with the races in
the slowpath.

Furthermore, to ease the testing of the performance impact of this new code,
there is means to disable this behaviour runtime (without having to reboot
the system), when scheduler debugging is enabled (CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y),
by issuing the following command:

 # echo NO_OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features

This command re-enables spinning again (this is also the default):

 # echo OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
This commit is contained in:
Peter Zijlstra
2009-01-12 14:01:47 +01:00
committed by Ingo Molnar
parent 41719b0309
commit 0d66bf6d35
8 changed files with 201 additions and 31 deletions
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5
include/linux/mutex.h
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@ -50,8 +50,10 @@ struct mutex {
atomic_t count;
spinlock_t wait_lock;
struct list_head wait_list;
#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES
#if defined(CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES) || defined(CONFIG_SMP)
struct thread_info *owner;
#endif
#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES
const char *name;
void *magic;
#endif
@ -68,7 +70,6 @@ struct mutex_waiter {
struct list_head list;
struct task_struct *task;
#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES
struct mutex *lock;
void *magic;
#endif
};