Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] mutex: Queue mutex spinners with MCS lock to reducecacheline contention

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Mon Apr 15 2013 - 12:28:38 EST


On 04/15/2013 10:37 AM, Waiman Long wrote:
The current mutex spinning code (with MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER option turned
on) allow multiple tasks to spin on a single mutex concurrently. A
potential problem with the current approach is that when the mutex
becomes available, all the spinning tasks will try to acquire the
mutex more or less simultaneously. As a result, there will be a lot of
cacheline bouncing especially on systems with a large number of CPUs.

This patch tries to reduce this kind of contention by putting the
mutex spinners into a queue so that only the first one in the queue
will try to acquire the mutex. This will reduce contention and allow
all the tasks to move forward faster.

The queuing of mutex spinners is done using an MCS lock based
implementation which will further reduce contention on the mutex
cacheline than a similar ticket spinlock based implementation. This
patch will add a new field into the mutex data structure for holding
the MCS lock. This expands the mutex size by 8 bytes for 64-bit system
and 4 bytes for 32-bit system. This overhead will be avoid if the
MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER option is turned off.

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@xxxxxx>

Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>

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