[PATCH] filtered wakeups
From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
This patch series is solving the "thundering herd" problem that occurs in the
mainline implementation of hashed waitqueues. There are two sources of
spurious wakeups in such arrangements:
(a) Hash collisions that place waiters on different objects on the same
waitqueue, which wakes threads falsely when any of the objects hashed to
the same queue receives a wakeup. i.e. loss of information about which
object a wakeup event is related to.
(b) Loss of information about which object a given waiter is waiting on.
This precludes wake-one semantics for mutual exclusion scenarios. For
instance, a lock bit may be slept on. If there are any waiters on the
object, a lock bit release event must wake at least one of them so as to
prevent deadlock. But without information as to which waiter is waiting
on which object, we must resort to waking all waiters who could possibly
be waiting on it. Now, as the lock bit provides mutual exclusion, only
one of the waiters woken can proceed, and the remainder will go back to
sleep and wait for another event, creating unnecessary system load. Once
wake-one semantics are established, only one of the waiters waiting to
acquire a lock bit need to be woken, which measurably reduces system load
and improves efficiency (i.e. it's the subject of the benchmarking I've
been sending to you).
Even beyond the measurable efficiency gains, there are reasons of robustness
and responsiveness to motivate addressing the issue of thundering herds. In a
real-life scenario I've been personally involved in resolving, the thundering
herd issue caused powerful modern SMP machines with fast IO systems to be
unresponsive to user input for a minute at a time or more. Analogues of these
patches for the distro kernels involved fully resolved the issue to the
customer's satisfaction and obviated workarounds to limit the pagecache's
size.
The latest spin of these patches basically shoves more pieces of the logic
into the wakeup functions, with some efficiency gains from sharing the hot
codepath with the rest of the kernel, and a slightly larger diff than the
patches with the newly-introduced entrypoint. Writing these was motivated by
the push to insulate sched.c from more of the details of wakeup semantics by
putting more of the logic into the wakeup functions. In order to accomplish
this while still solving (b), the wakeup functions grew a new argument for
communication about what object a wakeup event is related to to be passed by
the waker.
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This patch provides an additional argument to wakeup functions so that
information may be passed from the waker to the waiter. This is provided as a
separate patch so that the overhead of the additional argument can be measured
in isolation. No change in performance was observable here.
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