• Anton Blanchard's avatar
    powerpc: Use lwarx hint in spinlocks · 4e14a4d1
    Anton Blanchard authored
    Recent versions of the PowerPC architecture added a hint bit to the larx
    instructions to differentiate between an atomic operation and a lock operation:
    
    > 0 Other programs might attempt to modify the word in storage addressed by EA
    > even if the subsequent Store Conditional succeeds.
    >
    > 1 Other programs will not attempt to modify the word in storage addressed by
    > EA until the program that has acquired the lock performs a subsequent store
    > releasing the lock.
    
    To avoid a binutils dependency this patch create macros for the extended lwarx
    format and uses it in the spinlock code. To test this change I used a simple
    test case that acquires and releases a global pthread mutex:
    
    	pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
    	pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
    
    On a 32 core POWER6, running 32 test threads we spend almost all our time in
    the futex spinlock code:
    
        94.37%     perf  [kernel]                     [k] ._raw_spin_lock
                   |
                   |--99.95%-- ._raw_spin_lock
                   |          |
                   |          |--63.29%-- .futex_wake
                   |          |
                   |          |--36.64%-- .futex_wait_setup
    
    Which is a good test for this patch. The results (in lock/unlock operations per
    second) are:
    
    before: 1538203 ops/sec
    after:  2189219 ops/sec
    
    An improvement of 42%
    
    A 32 core POWER7 improves even more:
    
    before: 1279529 ops/sec
    after:  2282076 ops/sec
    
    An improvement of 78%
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAnton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
    4e14a4d1
spinlock.h 6.86 KB