Re: [PATCH v8 4/5] locking/qspinlock: Introduce starvation avoidance into CNA

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2020 at 11:54:02AM -0500, Alex Kogan wrote:
> > On Feb 3, 2020, at 10:47 AM, Waiman Long <longman@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > On 2/3/20 10:28 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >> On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 09:59:12AM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
> >>> On 2/3/20 8:45 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >>>> Presumably you have a workload where CNA is actually a win? That is,
> >>>> what inspired you to go down this road? Which actual kernel lock is so
> >>>> contended on NUMA machines that we need to do this?

> There are quite a few actually. files_struct.file_lock, file_lock_context.flc_lock
> and lockref.lock are some concrete examples that get very hot in will-it-scale
> benchmarks. 

Right, that's all a variant of banging on the same resources across
nodes. I'm not sure there's anything fundamental we can fix there.

> And then there are spinlocks in __futex_data.queues, 
> which get hot when applications have contended (pthread) locks â 
> LevelDB is an example.

A numa aware rework of futexes has been on the todo list for years :/

> Our initial motivation was based on an observation that kernel qspinlock is not 
> NUMA-aware. So what, you may ask. Much like people realized in the past that
> global spinning is bad for performance, and they switched from ticket lock to
> locks with local spinning (e.g., MCS), I think everyone would agree these days that
> bouncing a lock (and cache lines in general) across numa nodes is similarly bad.
> And as CNA demonstrates, we are easily leaving 2-3x speedups on the table by
> doing just that with the current qspinlock.

Actual benchmarks with performance numbers are required. It helps
motivate the patches as well as gives reviewers clues on how to
reproduce / inspect the claims made.