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authorPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>2009-01-12 14:01:47 +0100
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2009-01-14 18:09:02 +0100
commit0d66bf6d3514b35eb6897629059443132992dbd7 (patch)
treea47ee0fc3299361cf3b222c8242741adfedaab74 /README
parent41719b03091911028116155deddc5eedf8c45e37 (diff)
mutex: implement adaptive spinning
Change mutex contention behaviour such that it will sometimes busy wait on acquisition - moving its behaviour closer to that of spinlocks. This concept got ported to mainline from the -rt tree, where it was originally implemented for rtmutexes by Steven Rostedt, based on work by Gregory Haskins. Testing with Ingo's test-mutex application (http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/50) gave a 345% boost for VFS scalability on my testbox: # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops" avg ops/sec: 296604 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops" avg ops/sec: 85870 The key criteria for the busy wait is that the lock owner has to be running on a (different) cpu. The idea is that as long as the owner is running, there is a fair chance it'll release the lock soon, and thus we'll be better off spinning instead of blocking/scheduling. Since regular mutexes (as opposed to rtmutexes) do not atomically track the owner, we add the owner in a non-atomic fashion and deal with the races in the slowpath. Furthermore, to ease the testing of the performance impact of this new code, there is means to disable this behaviour runtime (without having to reboot the system), when scheduler debugging is enabled (CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y), by issuing the following command: # echo NO_OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features This command re-enables spinning again (this is also the default): # echo OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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