Skip to content
Commit a33fda35 authored by Waiman Long's avatar Waiman Long Committed by Ingo Molnar
Browse files

locking/qspinlock: Introduce a simple generic 4-byte queued spinlock



This patch introduces a new generic queued spinlock implementation that
can serve as an alternative to the default ticket spinlock. Compared
with the ticket spinlock, this queued spinlock should be almost as fair
as the ticket spinlock. It has about the same speed in single-thread
and it can be much faster in high contention situations especially when
the spinlock is embedded within the data structure to be protected.

Only in light to moderate contention where the average queue depth
is around 1-3 will this queued spinlock be potentially a bit slower
due to the higher slowpath overhead.

This queued spinlock is especially suit to NUMA machines with a large
number of cores as the chance of spinlock contention is much higher
in those machines. The cost of contention is also higher because of
slower inter-node memory traffic.

Due to the fact that spinlocks are acquired with preemption disabled,
the process will not be migrated to another CPU while it is trying
to get a spinlock. Ignoring interrupt handling, a CPU can only be
contending in one spinlock at any one time. Counting soft IRQ, hard
IRQ and NMI, a CPU can only have a maximum of 4 concurrent lock waiting
activities.  By allocating a set of per-cpu queue nodes and used them
to form a waiting queue, we can encode the queue node address into a
much smaller 24-bit size (including CPU number and queue node index)
leaving one byte for the lock.

Please note that the queue node is only needed when waiting for the
lock. Once the lock is acquired, the queue node can be released to
be used later.

Signed-off-by: default avatarWaiman Long <Waiman.Long@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Daniel J Blueman <daniel@numascale.com>
Cc: David Vrabel <david.vrabel@citrix.com>
Cc: Douglas Hatch <doug.hatch@hp.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <paolo.bonzini@gmail.com>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Raghavendra K T <raghavendra.kt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Scott J Norton <scott.norton@hp.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org
Cc: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1429901803-29771-2-git-send-email-Waiman.Long@hp.com


Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
parent 663fdcbe
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment