x86, spinlock: Replace pv spinlocks with pv ticketlocks
authorJeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Fri, 9 Aug 2013 14:21:49 +0000 (19:51 +0530)
committerH. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Fri, 9 Aug 2013 14:53:05 +0000 (07:53 -0700)
commit545ac13892ab391049a92108cf59a0d05de7e28c
treee993b90bcbedd44b77c895cf7fcee89ee5fe9d51
parentc095ba7224d8edc71dcef0d655911399a8bd4a3f
x86, spinlock: Replace pv spinlocks with pv ticketlocks

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.

Results:
=======
setup: 32 core machine with 32 vcpu KVM guest (HT off)  with 8GB RAM
base = 3.11-rc
patched = base + pvspinlock V12

+-----------------+----------------+--------+
 dbench (Throughput in MB/sec. Higher is better)
+-----------------+----------------+--------+
|   base (stdev %)|patched(stdev%) | %gain  |
+-----------------+----------------+--------+
| 15035.3   (0.3) |15150.0   (0.6) |   0.8  |
|  1470.0   (2.2) | 1713.7   (1.9) |  16.6  |
|   848.6   (4.3) |  967.8   (4.3) |  14.0  |
|   652.9   (3.5) |  685.3   (3.7) |   5.0  |
+-----------------+----------------+--------+

pvspinlock shows benefits for overcommit ratio > 1 for PLE enabled cases,
and undercommits results are flat

Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1376058122-8248-2-git-send-email-raghavendra.kt@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Tested-by: Attilio Rao <attilio.rao@citrix.com>
[ Raghavendra: Changed SPIN_THRESHOLD, fixed redefinition of arch_spinlock_t]
Signed-off-by: Raghavendra K T <raghavendra.kt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
arch/x86/include/asm/paravirt.h
arch/x86/include/asm/paravirt_types.h
arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock.h
arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock_types.h
arch/x86/kernel/paravirt-spinlocks.c
arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c