Re: [PATCH 1/2] brw_mutex: big read-write mutex

[Mikulas Patocka]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012, Dave Chinner wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 06:54:41PM -0400, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, 19 Oct 2012, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > 
> > > > Yes, I tried this approach - it involves doing LOCK instruction on read 
> > > > lock, remembering the cpu and doing another LOCK instruction on read 
> > > > unlock (which will hopefully be on the same CPU, so no cacheline bouncing 
> > > > happens in the common case). It was slower than the approach without any 
> > > > LOCK instructions (43.3 seconds seconds for the implementation with 
> > > > per-cpu LOCKed access, 42.7 seconds for this implementation without atomic 
> > > > instruction; the benchmark involved doing 512-byte direct-io reads and 
> > > > writes on a ramdisk with 8 processes on 8-core machine).
> > > 
> > > So why is that a problem? Surely that's already tons better then what
> > > you've currently got.
> > 
> > Percpu rw-semaphores do not improve performance at all. I put them there 
> > to avoid performance regression, not to improve performance.
> > 
> > All Linux kernels have a race condition - when you change block size of a 
> > block device and you read or write the device at the same time, a crash 
> > may happen. This bug is there since ever. Recently, this bug started to 
> > cause major trouble - multiple high profile business sites report crashes 
> > because of this race condition.
> >
> > You can fix this race by using a read lock around I/O paths and write lock 
> > around block size changing, but normal rw semaphore cause cache line 
> > bouncing when taken for read by multiple processors and I/O performance 
> > degradation because of it is measurable.
> 
> This doesn't sound like a new problem.  Hasn't this global access,
> single modifier exclusion problem been solved before in the VFS?
> e.g. mnt_want_write()/mnt_make_readonly()
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dave.

Yes, mnt_want_write()/mnt_make_readonly() do the same thing as percpu rw 
semaphores. I think you can convert mnt_want_write()/mnt_make_readonly() 
to use percpu rw semaphores and remove the duplicated code.

Mikulas
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