On 04/15/2013 10:37 AM, Waiman Long wrote:
The current mutex spinning code (with MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER option turned on) allow multiple tasks to spin on a single mutex concurrently. A potential problem with the current approach is that when the mutex becomes available, all the spinning tasks will try to acquire the mutex more or less simultaneously. As a result, there will be a lot of cacheline bouncing especially on systems with a large number of CPUs. This patch tries to reduce this kind of contention by putting the mutex spinners into a queue so that only the first one in the queue will try to acquire the mutex. This will reduce contention and allow all the tasks to move forward faster. The queuing of mutex spinners is done using an MCS lock based implementation which will further reduce contention on the mutex cacheline than a similar ticket spinlock based implementation. This patch will add a new field into the mutex data structure for holding the MCS lock. This expands the mutex size by 8 bytes for 64-bit system and 4 bytes for 32-bit system. This overhead will be avoid if the MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER option is turned off.
Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@xxxxxx>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> -- All rights reversed -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
