On 21/03/12 14:25, Stephan Diestelhorst wrote:
On Wednesday 21 March 2012, 13:49:28 Attilio Rao wrote:
On 21/03/12 13:22, Stephan Diestelhorst wrote:
On Wednesday 21 March 2012, 13:04:25 Attilio Rao wrote:
On 21/03/12 10:20, Raghavendra K T wrote:
From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge<jeremy.fitzhardinge@xxxxxxxxxx>
Rather than outright replacing the entire spinlock implementation in
order to paravirtualize it, keep the ticket lock implementation but add
a couple of pvops hooks on the slow patch (long spin on lock, unlocking
a contended lock).
Ticket locks have a number of nice properties, but they also have some
surprising behaviours in virtual environments. They enforce a strict
FIFO ordering on cpus trying to take a lock; however, if the hypervisor
scheduler does not schedule the cpus in the correct order, the system can
waste a huge amount of time spinning until the next cpu can take the lock.
(See Thomas Friebel's talk "Prevent Guests from Spinning Around"
http://www.xen.org/files/xensummitboston08/LHP.pdf for more details.)
To address this, we add two hooks:
- __ticket_spin_lock which is called after the cpu has been
spinning on the lock for a significant number of iterations but has
failed to take the lock (presumably because the cpu holding the lock
has been descheduled). The lock_spinning pvop is expected to block
the cpu until it has been kicked by the current lock holder.
- __ticket_spin_unlock, which on releasing a contended lock
(there are more cpus with tail tickets), it looks to see if the next
cpu is blocked and wakes it if so.
When compiled with CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCKS disabled, a set of stub
functions causes all the extra code to go away.
I've made some real world benchmarks based on this serie of patches
applied on top of a vanilla Linux-3.3-rc6 (commit
4704fe65e55fb088fbcb1dc0b15ff7cc8bff3685), with both
CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK=y and n, which means essentially 4 versions
compared:
* vanilla - CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK - patch
* vanilla + CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK - patch
* vanilla - CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK + patch
* vanilla + CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK + patch
[...]
== Results
This test points in the direction that Jeremy's rebased patches don't
introduce a peformance penalty at all, but also that we could likely
consider CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK option removal, or turn it on by
default and suggest disabling just on very old CPUs (assuming a
performance regression can be proven there).
Very interesting results, in particular knowing that in the one guest
case things do not get (significantly) slower due to the added logic
and LOCKed RMW in the unlock path.
AFAICR, the problem really became apparent when running multiple guests
time sharing the physical CPUs, i.e., two guests with eight vCPUs each
on an eight core machine. Did you look at this setup with your tests?
Please note that my tests are made on native Linux, without XEN involvement.
You maybe meant that the spinlock paravirtualization became generally
useful in the case you mentioned? (2 guests, 8vpcu + 8vcpu)?
Yes, that is what I meant. Just to clarify why you do not see any
speed-ups, and were wondering why. If the whole point of the exercise
was to see that there are no perforamnce regressions, fine. In that
case I misunderstood.
Yes, that's right, I just wanted to measure (possible) overhead in
native Linux and the cost of leaving CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCK on.
Thanks,
Attilio
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