Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] locking/mutex: Rewrite basic mutex

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 03:36:17PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> I think this is the right way to go. There isn't any big change in the
> slowpath, so the contended performance should be the same. The fastpath,
> however, will get a bit slower as a single atomic op plus a jump instruction
> (a single cacheline load) is replaced by a read-and-test and compxchg
> (potentially 2 cacheline loads) which will be somewhat slower than the
> optimized assembly code.

Yeah, I'll try and run some workloads tomorrow if you and Jason don't
beat me to it ;-)

> Alternatively, you can replace the
> __mutex_trylock() in mutex_lock() by just a blind cmpxchg to optimize the
> fastpath further. 

Problem with that is that we need to preserve the flag bits, so we need
the initial load.

Or were you thinking of: cmpxchg(&lock->owner, 0UL, (unsigned
long)current), which only works on uncontended locks?

> A cmpxhcg will still be a tiny bit slower than other
> atomic ops, but it will be more acceptable, I think.

I don't think cmpxchg is much slower than say xadd or xchg, the typical
problem with cmpxchg is the looping part, but single instruction costs
should be similar.

> BTW, I got the following compilation warning when I tried your patch:
> 
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c: In function âmutex_is_locked_byâ:
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c:44:22: error: invalid operands to
> binary == (have âatomic_long_tâ and âstruct task_struct *â)
> return mutex->owner == task;
> ^
> CC [M] drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_psr.o
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c:49:1: warning: control reaches end
> of non-void function [-Wreturn-type]
> }
> ^
> make[4]: *** [drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.o] Error 1
> 
> Apparently, you may need to look to see if there are other direct access of
> the owner field in the other code.

AArggghh.. that is horrible horrible code.

It tries to do a recursive mutex and pokes at the innards of the mutex.
that so deserves to break.