tjh.dev/kernel at v4.10-rc2

In commit 62906027091f ("mm: add PageWaiters indicating tasks are
waiting for a page bit") Nick Piggin made our page locking no longer
unconditionally touch the hashed page waitqueue, which not only helps
performance in general, but is particularly helpful on NUMA machines
where the hashed wait queues can bounce around a lot.

However, the "clear lock bit atomically and then test the waiters bit"
sequence turns out to be much more expensive than it needs to be,
because you get a nasty stall when trying to access the same word that
just got updated atomically.

On architectures where locking is done with LL/SC, this would be trivial
to fix with a new primitive that clears one bit and tests another
atomically, but that ends up not working on x86, where the only atomic
operations that return the result end up being cmpxchg and xadd. The
atomic bit operations return the old value of the same bit we changed,
not the value of an unrelated bit.

On x86, we could put the lock bit in the high bit of the byte, and use
"xadd" with that bit (where the overflow ends up not touching other
bits), and look at the other bits of the result. However, an even
simpler model is to just use a regular atomic "and" to clear the lock
bit, and then the sign bit in eflags will indicate the resulting state
of the unrelated bit #7.

So by moving the PageWaiters bit up to bit #7, we can atomically clear
the lock bit and test the waiters bit on x86 too. And architectures
with LL/SC (which is all the usual RISC suspects), the particular bit
doesn't matter, so they are fine with this approach too.

This avoids the extra access to the same atomic word, and thus avoids
the costly stall at page unlock time.

The only downside is that the interface ends up being a bit odd and
specialized: clear a bit in a byte, and test the sign bit. Nick doesn't
love the resulting name of the new primitive, but I'd rather make the
name be descriptive and very clear about the limitation imposed by
trying to work across all relevant architectures than make it be some
generic thing that doesn't make the odd semantics explicit.

So this introduces the new architecture primitive

clear_bit_unlock_is_negative_byte();

and adds the trivial implementation for x86. We have a generic
non-optimized fallback (that just does a "clear_bit()"+"test_bit(7)"
combination) which can be overridden by any architecture that can do
better. According to Nick, Power has the same hickup x86 has, for
example, but some other architectures may not even care.

All these optimizations mean that my page locking stress-test (which is
just executing a lot of small short-lived shell scripts: "make test" in
the git source tree) no longer makes our page locking look horribly bad.
Before all these optimizations, just the unlock_page() costs were just
over 3% of all CPU overhead on "make test". After this, it's down to
0.66%, so just a quarter of the cost it used to be.

(The difference on NUMA is bigger, but there this micro-optimization is
likely less noticeable, since the big issue on NUMA was not the accesses
to 'struct page', but the waitqueue accesses that were already removed
by Nick's earlier commit).

Acked-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Bob Peterson <rpeterso@redhat.com>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrew Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruenba@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

b91e1302

Linus Torvalds

9 years ago

Linux 4.10-rc1

7ce7d89f

Linus Torvalds

9 years ago

v4.10-rc1

Merge tag 'v4.10-rc1' into docs-next

54ab6db0

Jonathan Corbet

9 years ago

branches 2

master 14 hours ago default

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for-next 11 months ago

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tags 914

v6.19-rc4

6 days ago latest

README

Linux kernel
============

This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst

Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users.
These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.

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