Re: [PATCH V2 0/6][RFC] futex: FUTEX_LOCK with optional adaptivespinning

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 08:33 -0700, Darren Hart wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 07:47 -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> >> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 01:48, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >> wrote:
> >>>  try
> >>>  spin
> >>>  try
> >>>  syscall
> >> This is available for a long time in the mutex implementation
> >> (PTHREAD_MUTEX_ADAPTIVE_NP mutex type).  It hasn't show much
> >> improvement if any.  There were some people demanding this support for
> >> as far as I know they are not using it now.  This is adaptive
> >> spinning, learning from previous calls how long to wait.  But it's
> >> still unguided.  There is no way to get information like "the owner
> >> has been descheduled". 
> > 
> > That's where the FUTEX_LOCK thing comes in, it does all those, the above
> > was a single spin loop to amortize the syscall overhead.
> > 
> > I wouldn't make it any more complex than a single pause ins, syscalls
> > are terribly cheap these days.
> 
> And yet they still seem to have a real impact on the futex_lock 
> benchmark. Perhaps I am just still looking at pathological cases, but 
> there is a strong correlation between high syscall counts and really low 
> iterations per second. Granted this also correlates with lock 
> contention. However, when using the same period and duty-cycle I find 
> that a locking mechanism that makes significantly fewer syscalls also 
> significantly outperforms one that makes more. Kind of handwavy stilly, 
> I'll have more numbers this afternoon.

Sure, but I'm still not sure why FUTEX_LOCK ends up making more syscalls
than FUTEX_WAIT based locking. Both should only do the syscall when the
lock is contended, both should only ever do 1 syscall per acquire,
right?



--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/