Re: [PATCH RFC V9 0/19] Paravirtualized ticket spinlocks

From: Gleb Natapov
Date: Sun Jun 02 2013 - 04:09:39 EST


On Sun, Jun 02, 2013 at 12:51:25AM +0530, Raghavendra K T wrote:
>
> This series replaces the existing paravirtualized spinlock mechanism
> with a paravirtualized ticketlock mechanism. The series provides
> implementation for both Xen and KVM.
>
High level question here. We have a big hope for "Preemptable Ticket
Spinlock" patch series by Jiannan Ouyang to solve most, if not all,
ticketing spinlocks in overcommit scenarios problem without need for PV.
So how this patch series compares with his patches on PLE enabled processors?

> Changes in V9:
> - Changed spin_threshold to 32k to avoid excess halt exits that are
> causing undercommit degradation (after PLE handler improvement).
> - Added kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic (suggested by Gleb)
> - Optimized halt exit path to use PLE handler
>
> V8 of PVspinlock was posted last year. After Avi's suggestions to look
> at PLE handler's improvements, various optimizations in PLE handling
> have been tried.
>
> With this series we see that we could get little more improvements on top
> of that.
>
> Ticket locks have an inherent problem in a virtualized case, because
> the vCPUs are scheduled rather than running concurrently (ignoring
> gang scheduled vCPUs). This can result in catastrophic performance
> collapses when the vCPU scheduler doesn't schedule the correct "next"
> vCPU, and ends up scheduling a vCPU which burns its entire timeslice
> spinning. (Note that this is not the same problem as lock-holder
> preemption, which this series also addresses; that's also a problem,
> but not catastrophic).
>
> (See Thomas Friebel's talk "Prevent Guests from Spinning Around"
> http://www.xen.org/files/xensummitboston08/LHP.pdf for more details.)
>
> Currently we deal with this by having PV spinlocks, which adds a layer
> of indirection in front of all the spinlock functions, and defining a
> completely new implementation for Xen (and for other pvops users, but
> there are none at present).
>
> PV ticketlocks keeps the existing ticketlock implemenentation
> (fastpath) as-is, but adds a couple of pvops for the slow paths:
>
> - If a CPU has been waiting for a spinlock for SPIN_THRESHOLD
> iterations, then call out to the __ticket_lock_spinning() pvop,
> which allows a backend to block the vCPU rather than spinning. This
> pvop can set the lock into "slowpath state".
>
> - When releasing a lock, if it is in "slowpath state", the call
> __ticket_unlock_kick() to kick the next vCPU in line awake. If the
> lock is no longer in contention, it also clears the slowpath flag.
>
> The "slowpath state" is stored in the LSB of the within the lock tail
> ticket. This has the effect of reducing the max number of CPUs by
> half (so, a "small ticket" can deal with 128 CPUs, and "large ticket"
> 32768).
>
> For KVM, one hypercall is introduced in hypervisor,that allows a vcpu to kick
> another vcpu out of halt state.
> The blocking of vcpu is done using halt() in (lock_spinning) slowpath.
>
> Overall, it results in a large reduction in code, it makes the native
> and virtualized cases closer, and it removes a layer of indirection
> around all the spinlock functions.
>
> The fast path (taking an uncontended lock which isn't in "slowpath"
> state) is optimal, identical to the non-paravirtualized case.
>
> The inner part of ticket lock code becomes:
> inc = xadd(&lock->tickets, inc);
> inc.tail &= ~TICKET_SLOWPATH_FLAG;
>
> if (likely(inc.head == inc.tail))
> goto out;
> for (;;) {
> unsigned count = SPIN_THRESHOLD;
> do {
> if (ACCESS_ONCE(lock->tickets.head) == inc.tail)
> goto out;
> cpu_relax();
> } while (--count);
> __ticket_lock_spinning(lock, inc.tail);
> }
> out: barrier();
> which results in:
> push %rbp
> mov %rsp,%rbp
>
> mov $0x200,%eax
> lock xadd %ax,(%rdi)
> movzbl %ah,%edx
> cmp %al,%dl
> jne 1f # Slowpath if lock in contention
>
> pop %rbp
> retq
>
> ### SLOWPATH START
> 1: and $-2,%edx
> movzbl %dl,%esi
>
> 2: mov $0x800,%eax
> jmp 4f
>
> 3: pause
> sub $0x1,%eax
> je 5f
>
> 4: movzbl (%rdi),%ecx
> cmp %cl,%dl
> jne 3b
>
> pop %rbp
> retq
>
> 5: callq *__ticket_lock_spinning
> jmp 2b
> ### SLOWPATH END
>
> with CONFIG_PARAVIRT_SPINLOCKS=n, the code has changed slightly, where
> the fastpath case is straight through (taking the lock without
> contention), and the spin loop is out of line:
>
> push %rbp
> mov %rsp,%rbp
>
> mov $0x100,%eax
> lock xadd %ax,(%rdi)
> movzbl %ah,%edx
> cmp %al,%dl
> jne 1f
>
> pop %rbp
> retq
>
> ### SLOWPATH START
> 1: pause
> movzbl (%rdi),%eax
> cmp %dl,%al
> jne 1b
>
> pop %rbp
> retq
> ### SLOWPATH END
>
> The unlock code is complicated by the need to both add to the lock's
> "head" and fetch the slowpath flag from "tail". This version of the
> patch uses a locked add to do this, followed by a test to see if the
> slowflag is set. The lock prefix acts as a full memory barrier, so we
> can be sure that other CPUs will have seen the unlock before we read
> the flag (without the barrier the read could be fetched from the
> store queue before it hits memory, which could result in a deadlock).
>
> This is is all unnecessary complication if you're not using PV ticket
> locks, it also uses the jump-label machinery to use the standard
> "add"-based unlock in the non-PV case.
>
> if (TICKET_SLOWPATH_FLAG &&
> static_key_false(&paravirt_ticketlocks_enabled))) {
> arch_spinlock_t prev;
> prev = *lock;
> add_smp(&lock->tickets.head, TICKET_LOCK_INC);
>
> /* add_smp() is a full mb() */
> if (unlikely(lock->tickets.tail & TICKET_SLOWPATH_FLAG))
> __ticket_unlock_slowpath(lock, prev);
> } else
> __add(&lock->tickets.head, TICKET_LOCK_INC, UNLOCK_LOCK_PREFIX);
> which generates:
> push %rbp
> mov %rsp,%rbp
>
> nop5 # replaced by 5-byte jmp 2f when PV enabled
>
> # non-PV unlock
> addb $0x2,(%rdi)
>
> 1: pop %rbp
> retq
>
> ### PV unlock ###
> 2: movzwl (%rdi),%esi # Fetch prev
>
> lock addb $0x2,(%rdi) # Do unlock
>
> testb $0x1,0x1(%rdi) # Test flag
> je 1b # Finished if not set
>
> ### Slow path ###
> add $2,%sil # Add "head" in old lock state
> mov %esi,%edx
> and $0xfe,%dh # clear slowflag for comparison
> movzbl %dh,%eax
> cmp %dl,%al # If head == tail (uncontended)
> je 4f # clear slowpath flag
>
> # Kick next CPU waiting for lock
> 3: movzbl %sil,%esi
> callq *pv_lock_ops.kick
>
> pop %rbp
> retq
>
> # Lock no longer contended - clear slowflag
> 4: mov %esi,%eax
> lock cmpxchg %dx,(%rdi) # cmpxchg to clear flag
> cmp %si,%ax
> jne 3b # If clear failed, then kick
>
> pop %rbp
> retq
>
> So when not using PV ticketlocks, the unlock sequence just has a
> 5-byte nop added to it, and the PV case is reasonable straightforward
> aside from requiring a "lock add".
>
>
> Results:
> =======
> base = 3.10-rc2 kernel
> patched = base + this series
>
> The test was on 32 core (model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X7560) HT disabled
> with 32 KVM guest vcpu 8GB RAM.
>
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> ebizzy (records/sec) higher is better
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> base stdev patched stdev %improvement
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> 1x 5574.9000 237.4997 5618.0000 94.0366 0.77311
> 2x 2741.5000 561.3090 3332.0000 102.4738 21.53930
> 3x 2146.2500 216.7718 2302.3333 76.3870 7.27237
> 4x 1663.0000 141.9235 1753.7500 83.5220 5.45701
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> dbench (Throughput) higher is better
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> base stdev patched stdev %improvement
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
> 1x 14111.5600 754.4525 14645.9900 114.3087 3.78718
> 2x 2481.6270 71.2665 2667.1280 73.8193 7.47498
> 3x 1510.2483 31.8634 1503.8792 36.0777 -0.42173
> 4x 1029.4875 16.9166 1039.7069 43.8840 0.99267
> +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+
>
> Your suggestions and comments are welcome.
>
> github link: https://github.com/ktraghavendra/linux/tree/pvspinlock_v9
>
>
> Please note that we set SPIN_THRESHOLD = 32k with this series,
> that would eatup little bit of overcommit performance of PLE machines
> and overall performance of non-PLE machines.
>
> The older series was tested by Attilio for Xen implementation [1].
>
> Jeremy Fitzhardinge (9):
> x86/spinlock: Replace pv spinlocks with pv ticketlocks
> x86/ticketlock: Collapse a layer of functions
> xen: Defer spinlock setup until boot CPU setup
> xen/pvticketlock: Xen implementation for PV ticket locks
> xen/pvticketlocks: Add xen_nopvspin parameter to disable xen pv ticketlocks
> x86/pvticketlock: Use callee-save for lock_spinning
> x86/pvticketlock: When paravirtualizing ticket locks, increment by 2
> x86/ticketlock: Add slowpath logic
> xen/pvticketlock: Allow interrupts to be enabled while blocking
>
> Andrew Jones (1):
> Split jumplabel ratelimit
>
> Stefano Stabellini (1):
> xen: Enable PV ticketlocks on HVM Xen
>
> Srivatsa Vaddagiri (3):
> kvm hypervisor : Add a hypercall to KVM hypervisor to support pv-ticketlocks
> kvm guest : Add configuration support to enable debug information for KVM Guests
> kvm : Paravirtual ticketlocks support for linux guests running on KVM hypervisor
>
> Raghavendra K T (5):
> x86/ticketlock: Don't inline _spin_unlock when using paravirt spinlocks
> kvm : Fold pv_unhalt flag into GET_MP_STATE ioctl to aid migration
> Simplify kvm_for_each_vcpu with kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic
> Documentation/kvm : Add documentation on Hypercalls and features used for PV spinlock
> Add directed yield in vcpu block path
>
> ---
> Link in V8 has links to previous patch series and also whole history.
>
> V8 PV Ticketspinlock for Xen/KVM link:
> [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/2/119
>
> Documentation/virtual/kvm/cpuid.txt | 4 +
> Documentation/virtual/kvm/hypercalls.txt | 13 ++
> arch/ia64/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 5 +
> arch/powerpc/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 5 +
> arch/s390/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 5 +
> arch/x86/Kconfig | 10 +
> arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 7 +-
> arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_para.h | 14 +-
> arch/x86/include/asm/paravirt.h | 32 +--
> arch/x86/include/asm/paravirt_types.h | 10 +-
> arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock.h | 128 +++++++----
> arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock_types.h | 16 +-
> arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h | 1 +
> arch/x86/kernel/kvm.c | 256 +++++++++++++++++++++
> arch/x86/kernel/paravirt-spinlocks.c | 18 +-
> arch/x86/kvm/cpuid.c | 3 +-
> arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c | 5 +-
> arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 39 +++-
> arch/x86/xen/smp.c | 3 +-
> arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c | 384 ++++++++++---------------------
> include/linux/jump_label.h | 26 +--
> include/linux/jump_label_ratelimit.h | 34 +++
> include/linux/kvm_host.h | 2 +-
> include/linux/perf_event.h | 1 +
> include/uapi/linux/kvm_para.h | 1 +
> kernel/jump_label.c | 1 +
> virt/kvm/kvm_main.c | 6 +-
> 27 files changed, 645 insertions(+), 384 deletions(-)

--
Gleb.
--
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/