Recent versions of the PowerPC architecture added a hint bit to the larx
instructions to differentiate between an atomic operation and a lock operation:
> 0 Other programs might attempt to modify the word in storage addressed by EA
> even if the subsequent Store Conditional succeeds.
>
> 1 Other programs will not attempt to modify the word in storage addressed by
> EA until the program that has acquired the lock performs a subsequent store
> releasing the lock.
To avoid a binutils dependency this patch create macros for the extended lwarx
format and uses it in the spinlock code. To test this change I used a simple
test case that acquires and releases a global pthread mutex:
pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
On a 32 core POWER6, running 32 test threads we spend almost all our time in
the futex spinlock code:
94.37% perf [kernel] [k] ._raw_spin_lock
|
|--99.95%-- ._raw_spin_lock
| |
| |--63.29%-- .futex_wake
| |
| |--36.64%-- .futex_wait_setup
Which is a good test for this patch. The results (in lock/unlock operations per
second) are:
before: 1538203 ops/sec
after: 2189219 ops/sec
An improvement of 42%
A 32 core POWER7 improves even more:
before: 1279529 ops/sec
after: 2282076 ops/sec
An improvement of 78%
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
