On 03/13/2014 06:54 AM, David Vrabel wrote:
On 12/03/14 18:54, Waiman Long wrote:
Locking is always an issue in a virtualized environment as the virtual
CPU that is waiting on a lock may get scheduled out and hence block
any progress in lock acquisition even when the lock has been freed.
One solution to this problem is to allow unfair lock in a
para-virtualized environment. In this case, a new lock acquirer can
come and steal the lock if the next-in-line CPU to get the lock is
scheduled out. Unfair lock in a native environment is generally not a
good idea as there is a possibility of lock starvation for a heavily
contended lock.
I do not think this is a good idea -- the problems with unfair locks are
worse in a virtualized guest. If a waiting VCPU deschedules and has to
be kicked to grab a lock then it is very likely to lose a race with
another running VCPU trying to take a lock (since it takes time for the
VCPU to be rescheduled).
I have seen figure that it will take about 1000 cycles to kick in a CPU.
As long as the critical section isn't that long, there is enough time
for a lock stealer to come in, grab the lock, do whatever it needs to do
and leave without introducing too much latency to the kicked-in CPU.
Anyway there are people who ask for unfair lock. In fact, RHEL6 ship a
virtual guest with unfair lock. So I provide an option for those people
who want unfair lock to enable it in their virtual guest. For those who
don't want it, they can always turn them off when building the kernel.
With the unfair locking activated on bare metal 4-socket Westmere-EX
box, the execution times (in ms) of a spinlock micro-benchmark were
as follows:
# of Ticket Fair Unfair
tasks lock queue lock queue lock
------ ------- ---------- ----------
1 135 135 137
2 1045 1120 747
3 1827 2345 1084
4 2689 2934 1438
5 3736 3658 1722
6 4942 4434 2092
7 6304 5176 2245
8 7736 5955 2388
Are these figures with or without the later PV support patches?
This is without the PV patch.
Regards,
Longman
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