Yanmin Zhang reported:
| Comparing with kernel 2.6.25, AIM7 (use tmpfs) has more th
| regression under 2.6.26-rc1 on my 8-core stoakley, 16-core tigerton,
| and Itanium Montecito. Bisect located the patch below:
|
| 64ac24e738 is first bad commit
| commit 64ac24e738
| Author: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>
| Date: Fri Mar 7 21:55:58 2008 -0500
|
| Generic semaphore implementation
|
| After I manually reverted the patch against 2.6.26-rc1 while fixing
| lots of conflicts/errors, aim7 regression became less than 2%.
i reproduced the AIM7 workload and can confirm Yanmin's findings that
-.26-rc1 regresses over .25 - by over 67% here.
Looking at the workload i found and fixed what i believe to be the real
bug causing the AIM7 regression: it was inefficient wakeup / scheduling
/ locking behavior of the new generic semaphore code, causing suboptimal
performance.
The problem comes from the following code. The new semaphore code does
this on down():
spin_lock_irqsave(&sem->lock, flags);
if (likely(sem->count > 0))
sem->count--;
else
__down(sem);
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&sem->lock, flags);
and this on up():
spin_lock_irqsave(&sem->lock, flags);
if (likely(list_empty(&sem->wait_list)))
sem->count++;
else
__up(sem);
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&sem->lock, flags);
where __up() does:
list_del(&waiter->list);
waiter->up = 1;
wake_up_process(waiter->task);
and where __down() does this in essence:
list_add_tail(&waiter.list, &sem->wait_list);
waiter.task = task;
waiter.up = 0;
for (;;) {
[...]
spin_unlock_irq(&sem->lock);
timeout = schedule_timeout(timeout);
spin_lock_irq(&sem->lock);
if (waiter.up)
return 0;
}
the fastpath looks good and obvious, but note the following property of
the contended path: if there's a task on the ->wait_list, the up() of
the current owner will "pass over" ownership to that waiting task, in a
wake-one manner, via the waiter->up flag and by removing the waiter from
the wait list.
That is all and fine in principle, but as implemented in
kernel/semaphore.c it also creates a nasty, hidden source of contention!
The contention comes from the following property of the new semaphore
code: the new owner owns the semaphore exclusively, even if it is not
running yet.
So if the old owner, even if just a few instructions later, does a
down() [lock_kernel()] again, it will be blocked and will have to wait
on the new owner to eventually be scheduled (possibly on another CPU)!
Or if another task gets to lock_kernel() sooner than the "new owner"
scheduled, it will be blocked unnecessarily and for a very long time
when there are 2000 tasks running.
I.e. the implementation of the new semaphores code does wake-one and
lock ownership in a very restrictive way - it does not allow
opportunistic re-locking of the lock at all and keeps the scheduler from
picking task order intelligently.
This kind of scheduling, with 2000 AIM7 processes running, creates awful
cross-scheduling between those 2000 tasks, causes reduced parallelism, a
throttled runqueue length and a lot of idle time. With increasing number
of CPUs it causes an exponentially worse behavior in AIM7, as the chance
for a newly woken new-owner task to actually run anytime soon is less
and less likely.
Note that it takes just a tiny bit of contention for the 'new-semaphore
catastrophy' to happen: the wakeup latencies get added to whatever small
contention there is, and quickly snowball out of control!
I believe Yanmin's findings and numbers support this analysis too.
The best fix for this problem is to use the same scheduling logic that
the kernel/mutex.c code uses: keep the wake-one behavior (that is OK and
wanted because we do not want to over-schedule), but also allow
opportunistic locking of the lock even if a wakee is already "in
flight".
The patch below implements this new logic. With this patch applied the
AIM7 regression is largely fixed on my quad testbox:
# v2.6.25 vanilla:
..................
Tasks Jobs/Min JTI Real CPU Jobs/sec/task
2000 56096.4 91 207.5 789.7 0.4675
2000 55894.4 94 208.2 792.7 0.4658
# v2.6.26-rc1-166-gc0a1811 vanilla:
...................................
Tasks Jobs/Min JTI Real CPU Jobs/sec/task
2000 33230.6 83 350.3 784.5 0.2769
2000 31778.1 86 366.3 783.6 0.2648
# v2.6.26-rc1-166-gc0a1811 + semaphore-speedup:
...............................................
Tasks Jobs/Min JTI Real CPU Jobs/sec/task
2000 55707.1 92 209.0 795.6 0.4642
2000 55704.4 96 209.0 796.0 0.4642
i.e. a 67% speedup. We are now back to within 1% of the v2.6.25
performance levels and have zero idle time during the test, as expected.
Btw., interactivity also improved dramatically with the fix - for
example console-switching became almost instantaneous during this
workload (which after all is running 2000 tasks at once!), without the
patch it was stuck for a minute at times.
There's another nice side-effect of this speedup patch, the new generic
semaphore code got even smaller:
text data bss dec hex filename
1241 0 0 1241 4d9 semaphore.o.before
1207 0 0 1207 4b7 semaphore.o.after
(because the waiter.up complication got removed.)
Longer-term we should look into using the mutex code for the generic
semaphore code as well - but i's not easy due to legacies and it's
outside of the scope of v2.6.26 and outside the scope of this patch as
well.
Bisected-by: "Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
bf726eab37