From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@xxxxxxxxxx> This series replaces the existing paravirtualized spinlock mechanism with a paravirtualized ticketlock mechanism. Ticket locks have an inherent problem in a virtualized case, because the vCPUs are scheduled rather than running concurrently (ignoring gang scheduled vCPUs). This can result in catastrophic performance collapses when the vCPU scheduler doesn't schedule the correct "next" vCPU, and ends up scheduling a vCPU which burns its entire timeslice spinning. (Note that this is not the same problem as lock-holder preemption, which this series also addresses; that's also a problem, but not catastrophic). (See Thomas Friebel's talk "Prevent Guests from Spinning Around" http://www.xen.org/files/xensummitboston08/LHP.pdf for more details.) Currently we deal with this by having PV spinlocks, which adds a layer of indirection in front of all the spinlock functions, and defining a completely new implementation for Xen (and for other pvops users, but there are none at present). PV ticketlocks keeps the existing ticketlock implemenentation (fastpath) as-is, but adds a couple of pvops for the slow paths: - If a CPU has been waiting for a spinlock for SPIN_THRESHOLD iterations, then call out to the __ticket_lock_spinning() pvop, which allows a backend to block the vCPU rather than spinning. This pvop can set the lock into "slowpath state". - When releasing a lock, if it is in "slowpath state", the call __ticket_unlock_kick() to kick the next vCPU in line awake. If the lock is no longer in contention, it also clears the slowpath flag. The "slowpath state" is stored in the LSB of the within the lock ticket. This has the effect of reducing the max number of CPUs by half (so, a "small ticket" can deal with 128 CPUs, and "large ticket" 32768). This series provides a Xen implementation, but it should be straightforward to add a KVM implementation as well. Overall, it results in a large reduction in code, it makes the native and virtualized cases closer, and it removes a layer of indirection around all the spinlock functions. The downside is that it does add a few instructions into the fastpath in the native case. Most of the heavy lifting code is in the slowpaths, but it does have an effect on the fastpath code. The inner part of ticket lock code becomes: inc = xadd(&lock->tickets, inc); inc.tail &= ~TICKET_SLOWPATH_FLAG; for (;;) { unsigned count = SPIN_THRESHOLD; do { if (inc.head == inc.tail) goto out; cpu_relax(); inc.head = ACCESS_ONCE(lock->tickets.head); } while (--count); __ticket_lock_spinning(lock, inc.tail); } which results in: pushq %rbp movq %rsp,%rbp movl $512, %ecx lock; xaddw %cx, (%rdi) # claim ticket movzbl %ch, %edx movl $2048, %eax # set spin count andl $-2, %edx # mask off TICKET_SLOWPATH_FLAG movzbl %dl, %esi 1: cmpb %dl, %cl # compare head and tail je 2f # got it! ### BEGIN SLOWPATH rep; nop # pause decl %eax # dec count movb (%rdi), %cl # re-fetch head jne 1b # try again call *pv_lock_ops # call __ticket_lock_spinning movl $2048, %eax # reload spin count jmp 1b ### END SLOWPATH 2: popq %rbp ret with CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCKS=n, the same code identical asm to the current ticketlock code: pushq %rbp movq %rsp, %rbp movl $256, %eax lock; xaddw %ax, (%rdi) movzbl %ah, %edx 1: cmpb %dl, %al # compare head and tail je 2f # got it! ### BEGIN SLOWPATH rep; nop # pause movb (%rdi), %al # reload head jmp 1b # loop ### END SLOWPATH 2: popq %rbp ret so the pv ticketlocks add 3 extra instructions to the fastpath, one of which really doesn't need to be there (setting up the arg for the slowpath function): movl $2048, %eax # set spin count andl $-2, %edx # mask off SLOW_PATH_FLAG movzbl %dl, %esi # set up __ticket_lock_spinning arg The unlock code is very straightforward: __ticket_unlock_release(lock); if (unlikely(__ticket_in_slowpath(lock))) __ticket_unlock_slowpath(lock); which generates: addb $2, (%rdi) testb $1, 1(%rdi) je 1f call __ticket_unlock_slowpath 1: which, while simple, is more complex than the simple "incb (%rdi)". (I'm not sure whether its worth inlining this or not.) Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks, J Jeremy Fitzhardinge (12): x86/spinlocks: replace pv spinlocks with pv ticketlocks x86/ticketlock: collapse a layer of functions xen/pvticketlock: Xen implementation for PV ticket locks x86/pvticketlock: use callee-save for lock_spinning x86/ticketlocks: when paravirtualizing ticket locks, increment by 2 x86/ticketlock: add slowpath logic x86/ticketlocks: tidy up __ticket_unlock_kick() xen/pvticketlock: disable interrupts while blocking x86/pvticketlocks: we only need to kick if there's waiters xen/pvticket: allow interrupts to be enabled while blocking x86/pvticketlock: make sure unlock_kick pvop call is inlined x86/pvticketlock: use __ticket_t for pvop args Srivatsa Vaddagiri (1): x86/ticketlock: only do kick after doing unlock arch/x86/include/asm/paravirt.h | 30 +--- arch/x86/include/asm/paravirt_types.h | 8 +- arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock.h | 118 ++++++++----- arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock_types.h | 16 ++- arch/x86/kernel/paravirt-spinlocks.c | 40 +++-- arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c | 305 ++++++++------------------------- 6 files changed, 186 insertions(+), 331 deletions(-) -- 1.7.6 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html