mutex: Queue mutex spinners with MCS lock to reduce cacheline contention

Date	Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:37:58 -0400

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.

The following table shows the jobs per minute (JPM) scalability data
on an 8-node 80-core Westmere box with a 3.7.10 kernel. The numactl
command is used to restrict the running of the fserver workloads to
1/2/4/8 nodes with hyperthreading off.

+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-------------+----------+
|  Configuration  | Mean JPM  | Mean JPM  |  Mean JPM   | % Change |
|		  | w/o patch | patch 1   | patches 1&2 |  1->1&2  |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+
|		  |              User Range 1100 - 2000		   |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+
| 8 nodes, HT off |  227972   |  227237   |   305043    |  +34.2%  |
| 4 nodes, HT off |  393503   |  381558   |   394650    |   +3.4%  |
| 2 nodes, HT off |  334957   |  325240   |   338853    |   +4.2%  |
| 1 node , HT off |  198141   |  197972   |   198075    |   +0.1%  |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+
|		  |              User Range 200 - 1000		   |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+
| 8 nodes, HT off |  282325   |  312870   |   332185    |   +6.2%  |
| 4 nodes, HT off |  390698   |  378279   |   393419    |   +4.0%  |
| 2 nodes, HT off |  336986   |  326543   |   340260    |   +4.2%  |
| 1 node , HT off |  197588   |  197622   |   197582    |    0.0%  |
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-------------+----------+
At low user range 10-100, the JPM differences were within +/-1%. So
they are not that interesting.

The fserver workload uses mutex spinning extensively. With just
the mutex change in the first patch, there is no noticeable change
in performance.  Rather, there is a slight drop in performance. This
mutex spinning patch more than recovers the lost performance and show
a significant increase of +30% at high user load with the full 8 nodes.
Similar improvements were also seen in a 3.8 kernel.

The table below shows the %time spent by different kernel functions
as reported by perf when running the fserver workload at 1500 users
with all 8 nodes.

+-----------------------+-----------+---------+-------------+
|        Function       |  % time   | % time  |   % time    |
|                       | w/o patch | patch 1 | patches 1&2 |
+-----------------------+-----------+---------+-------------+
| __read_lock_failed    |  34.96%   | 34.91%  |   29.14%    |
| __write_lock_failed   |  10.14%   | 10.68%  |    7.51%    |
| mutex_spin_on_owner   |   3.62%   |  3.42%  |    2.33%    |
| mspin_lock            |    N/A    |   N/A   |    9.90%    |
| __mutex_lock_slowpath |   1.46%   |  0.81%  |    0.14%    |
| _raw_spin_lock        |   2.25%   |  2.50%  |    1.10%    |
+-----------------------+-----------+---------+-------------+
The fserver workload for an 8-node system is dominated by the
contention in the read/write lock. Mutex contention also plays a
role. With the first patch only, mutex contention is down (as shown by
the __mutex_lock_slowpath figure) which help a little bit. We saw only
a few percents improvement with that.

By applying patch 2 as well, the single mutex_spin_on_owner figure is
now split out into an additional mspin_lock figure. The time increases
from 3.42% to 11.23%. It shows a great reduction in contention among
the spinners leading to a 30% improvement. The time ratio 9.9/2.33=4.3
indicates that there are on average 4+ spinners waiting in the spin_lock
loop for each spinner in the mutex_spin_on_owner loop. Contention in
other locking functions also go down by quite a lot.

The table below shows the performance change of both patches 1 & 2 over
patch 1 alone in other AIM7 workloads (at 8 nodes, hyperthreading off).

+--------------+---------------+----------------+-----------------+
|   Workload   | mean % change | mean % change  | mean % change   |
|              | 10-100 users  | 200-1000 users | 1100-2000 users |
+--------------+---------------+----------------+-----------------+
| alltests     |      0.0%     |     -0.8%      |     +0.6%       |
| five_sec     |     -0.3%     |     +0.8%      |     +0.8%       |
| high_systime |     +0.4%     |     +2.4%      |     +2.1%       |
| new_fserver  |     +0.1%     |    +14.1%      |    +34.2%       |
| shared       |     -0.5%     |     -0.3%      |     -0.4%       |
| short        |     -1.7%     |     -9.8%      |     -8.3%       |
+--------------+---------------+----------------+-----------------+
The short workload is the only one that shows a decline in performance
probably due to the spinner locking and queuing overhead.

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hp.com>
sched: Implement smarter wake-affine logic

The wake-affine scheduler feature is currently always trying to pull
the wakee close to the waker. In theory this should be beneficial if
the waker's CPU caches hot data for the wakee, and it's also beneficial
in the extreme ping-pong high context switch rate case.

Testing shows it can benefit hackbench up to 15%.

However, the feature is somewhat blind, from which some workloads
such as pgbench suffer. It's also time-consuming algorithmically.

Testing shows it can damage pgbench up to 50% - far more than the
benefit it brings in the best case.

So wake-affine should be smarter and it should realize when to
stop its thankless effort at trying to find a suitable CPU to wake on.

This patch introduces 'wakee_flips', which will be increased each
time the task flips (switches) its wakee target.

So a high 'wakee_flips' value means the task has more than one
wakee, and the bigger the number, the higher the wakeup frequency.

Now when making the decision on whether to pull or not, pay attention to
the wakee with a high 'wakee_flips', pulling such a task may benefit
the wakee. Also imply that the waker will face cruel competition later,
it could be very cruel or very fast depends on the story behind
'wakee_flips', waker therefore suffers.

Furthermore, if waker also has a high 'wakee_flips', that implies that
multiple tasks rely on it, then waker's higher latency will damage all
of them, so pulling wakee seems to be a bad deal.

Thus, when 'waker->wakee_flips / wakee->wakee_flips' becomes
higher and higher, the cost of pulling seems to be worse and worse.

The patch therefore helps the wake-affine feature to stop its pulling
work when:

	wakee->wakee_flips > factor &&
	waker->wakee_flips > (factor * wakee->wakee_flips)
The 'factor' here is the number of CPUs in the current CPU's NUMA node,
so a bigger node will lead to more pulling since the trial becomes more
severe.

After applying the patch, pgbench shows up to 40% improvements and no regressions.

Tested with 12 cpu x86 server and tip 3.10.0-rc7.

The percentages in the final column highlight the areas with the biggest wins,
all other areas improved as well:

	pgbench		    base	smart

	| db_size | clients |  tps  |	|  tps  |
	+---------+---------+-------+   +-------+
	| 22 MB   |       1 | 10598 |   | 10796 |
	| 22 MB   |       2 | 21257 |   | 21336 |
	| 22 MB   |       4 | 41386 |   | 41622 |
	| 22 MB   |       8 | 51253 |   | 57932 |
	| 22 MB   |      12 | 48570 |   | 54000 |
	| 22 MB   |      16 | 46748 |   | 55982 | +19.75%
	| 22 MB   |      24 | 44346 |   | 55847 | +25.93%
	| 22 MB   |      32 | 43460 |   | 54614 | +25.66%
	| 7484 MB |       1 |  8951 |   |  9193 |
	| 7484 MB |       2 | 19233 |   | 19240 |
	| 7484 MB |       4 | 37239 |   | 37302 |
	| 7484 MB |       8 | 46087 |   | 50018 |
	| 7484 MB |      12 | 42054 |   | 48763 |
	| 7484 MB |      16 | 40765 |   | 51633 | +26.66%
	| 7484 MB |      24 | 37651 |   | 52377 | +39.11%
	| 7484 MB |      32 | 37056 |   | 51108 | +37.92%
	| 15 GB   |       1 |  8845 |   |  9104 |
	| 15 GB   |       2 | 19094 |   | 19162 |
	| 15 GB   |       4 | 36979 |   | 36983 |
	| 15 GB   |       8 | 46087 |   | 49977 |
	| 15 GB   |      12 | 41901 |   | 48591 |
	| 15 GB   |      16 | 40147 |   | 50651 | +26.16%
	| 15 GB   |      24 | 37250 |   | 52365 | +40.58%
	| 15 GB   |      32 | 36470 |   | 50015 | +37.14%
Signed-off-by: Michael Wang <wangyun@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/51D50057.9000809@linux.vnet.ibm.com
[ Improved the changelog. ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

Signed-off-by: Paul Reioux <reioux@gmail.com>
sched: Micro-optimize the smart wake-affine logic

Smart wake-affine is using node-size as the factor currently, but the overhead
of the mask operation is high.

Thus, this patch introduce the 'sd_llc_size' percpu variable, which will record
the highest cache-share domain size, and make it to be the new factor, in order
to reduce the overhead and make it more reasonable.

Tested-by: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr.bueso@hp.com>
Tested-by: Michael Wang <wangyun@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Michael Wang <wangyun@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/51D5008E.6030102@linux.vnet.ibm.com
[ Tidied up the changelog. ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

Signed-off-by: Paul Reioux <reioux@gmail.com>
sched/fair: Optimize find_busiest_queue()

Use for_each_cpu_and() and thereby avoid computing the capacity for
CPUs we know we're not interested in.

Reviewed-by: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Preeti U Murthy <preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-lppceyv6kb3a19g8spmrn20b@git.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul Reioux <reioux@gmail.com>

backported for Linux 3.4

Conflicts:
	kernel/sched/fair.c
sched/fair: Optimize cgroup pick_next_task_fair()

Since commit 2f36825b1 ("sched: Next buddy hint on sleep and preempt
path") it is likely we pick a new task from the same cgroup, doing a put
and then set on all intermediate entities is a waste of time, so try to
avoid this.

Measured using:

  mount nodev /cgroup -t cgroup -o cpu
  cd /cgroup
  mkdir a; cd a
  mkdir b; cd b
  mkdir c; cd c
  echo $$ > tasks
  perf stat --repeat 10 -- taskset 1 perf bench sched pipe

PRE :      4.542422684 seconds time elapsed   ( +-  0.33% )
POST:      4.389409991 seconds time elapsed   ( +-  0.32% )

Which shows a significant improvement of ~3.5%

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1328936700.2476.17.camel@laptop
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul Reioux <reioux@gmail.com>

Backported for Linux 3.4 kernel

Conflicts:
	kernel/sched/fair.c
sched: Reduce overestimating rq->avg_idle

Date	Thu, 29 Aug 2013 13:05:34 -0700

When updating avg_idle, if the delta exceeds some max value, then avg_idle
gets set to the max, regardless of what the previous avg was. This can cause
avg_idle to often be overestimated.

This patch modifies the way we update avg_idle by always updating it with the
function call to update_avg() first. Then, if avg_idle exceeds the max, we set
it to the max.

Signed-off-by: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>

Signed-off-by: Paul Reioux <reioux@gmail.com>
iov_iter: move into its own file

This moves the iov_iter functions in to their own file.  We're going to
be working on them in upcoming patches.  They become sufficiently large,
and remain self-contained, to justify seperating them from the rest of
the huge mm/filemap.c.

Signed-off-by: Dave Kleikamp <dave.kleikamp@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Cc: Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net>
dio: Convert direct_IO to use iov_iter

Change the direct_IO aop to take an iov_iter argument rather than an iovec.
This will get passed down through most filesystems so that only the
__blockdev_direct_IO helper need be aware of whether user or kernel memory
is being passed to the function.

Signed-off-by: Dave Kleikamp <dave.kleikamp@oracle.com>
heavily backported for Mako from LKML reference

Signed-off-by: faux123 <reioux@gmail.com>

Conflicts:
	fs/ext4/inode.c
	fs/fat/inode.c
fs: pull iov_iter use higher up the stack

Right now only callers of generic_perform_write() pack their iovec
arguments into an iov_iter structure.  All the callers higher up in the
stack work on raw iovec arguments.

This patch introduces the use of the iov_iter abstraction higher up the
stack.  Private generic path functions are changed to operation on
iov_iter instead of on raw iovecs.  Exported interfaces that take iovecs
immediately pack their arguments into an iov_iter and call into the
shared functions.

File operation struct functions are added with iov_iter as an argument
so that callers to the generic file system functions can specify
abstract memory rather than iovec arrays only.

Almost all of this patch only transforms arguments and shouldn't change
functionality.  The buffered read path is the exception.  We add a
read_actor function which uses the iov_iter helper functions instead of
operating on each individual iovec element.  This may improve
performance as the iov_iter helper can copy multiple iovec elements from
one mapped page cache page.

As always, the direct IO path is special.  Sadly, it may still be
cleanest to have it work on the underlying memory structures directly
instead of working through the iov_iter abstraction.

Signed-off-by: Dave Kleikamp <dave.kleikamp@oracle.com>
Cc: Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net>
modified for Mako from LKML reference

Signed-off-by: faux123 <reioux@gmail.com>
tmpfs: add support for read_iter and write_iter

Convert tmpfs do_shmem_file_read() to shmem_file_read_iter().
Make file_read_iter_actor() global so tmpfs can use it too: delete
file_read_actor(), which was made global in 2.4.4 for use by tmpfs.
Replace tmpfs generic_file_aio_write() by generic_file_write_iter().

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
modified for Mako from LKML reference

Signed-off-by: faux123 <reioux@gmail.com>