Re: [patch 0/9] mutex subsystem, -V4

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
>
> IMO there are still too many questions open, so I can understand Andrew. We 
> may only cover up the problem instead of fixing it. I understand that mutexes 
> have advantages, but if we compare them to semaphores it should be a fair 
> comparison, otherwise people start to think semaphores are something bad. The 
> majority of the discussion has been about microoptimisation, but on some 
> archs non-debug mutexes and semaphores may very well be the same thing.

Ingo has told me offline that he thinks that we can indeed remove the
current semaphore implementation.

90% of existing semaphore users get migrated to mutexes.

9% of current semaphore users get migrated to completions.

The remaining 1% of semaphore users are using the counting feature.  We
reimplement that in a mostly-arch-independent fashion and then remove the
current semaphore implementation.  Note that there are no sequencing
dependencies in all the above.

It's a lot of churn, but we'll end up with a better end result and a
somewhat-net-simpler kernel, so I'm happy.


One side point on semaphores and mutexes: the so-called "fast path" is
generally not performance-critical, because we just don't take them at high
frequencies.  Any workload which involves taking a semaphore at more than
50,000-100,000 times/second tends to have ghastly overscheduling failure
scenarios on SMP.  So people hit those scenarios and the code gets
converted to a lockless algorithm or to use spinlocking.

For example, for a while ext3/JBD was doing 200,000 context-switches per
second due to taking lock_super() at high frequencies.  When I converted
the whole fs to use spin locking throughout the performance in some
workloads went up by 1000%.

Another example: Ingo's VFS stresstest which is hitting i_sem hard: it only
does ~8000 ops/sec on an 8-way, and it's an artificial microbenchmark which
is _designed_ to hit that lock hard.  So if/when i_sem is converted to a
mutex, I figure that the benefits to ARM in that workload will be about a
0.01% performance increase.  ie: about two hours' worth of Moore's law in a
dopey microbenchmark.

For these reasons, I think that with sleeping locks, the fastpath is
realtively unimportant.  What _is_ important is not screwing up the
slowpath and not taking the lock at too high a frequency.  Because either
one will cause overscheduling which is a grossly worse problem.

Also, there's very little point in adding lots of tricky arch-dependent
code and generally mucking up the kernel source to squeeze the last drop of
performance out of the sleeping lock fastpath.  Because if those changes
actually make a difference, we've already lost - the code needs to be
changed to use spinlocking.
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