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  11. Dec 30, 2016
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      mm: optimize PageWaiters bit use for unlock_page() · b91e1302
      Linus Torvalds authored 
      

In commit 62906027 ("mm: add PageWaiters indicating tasks are
waiting for a page bit") Nick Piggin made our page locking no longer
unconditionally touch the hashed page waitqueue, which not only helps
performance in general, but is particularly helpful on NUMA machines
where the hashed wait queues can bounce around a lot.

However, the "clear lock bit atomically and then test the waiters bit"
sequence turns out to be much more expensive than it needs to be,
because you get a nasty stall when trying to access the same word that
just got updated atomically.

On architectures where locking is done with LL/SC, this would be trivial
to fix with a new primitive that clears one bit and tests another
atomically, but that ends up not working on x86, where the only atomic
operations that return the result end up being cmpxchg and xadd.  The
atomic bit operations return the old value of the same bit we changed,
not the value of an unrelated bit.

On x86, we could put the lock bit in the high bit of the byte, and use
"xadd" with that bit (where the overflow ends up not touching other
bits), and look at the other bits of the result.  However, an even
simpler model is to just use a regular atomic "and" to clear the lock
bit, and then the sign bit in eflags will indicate the resulting state
of the unrelated bit #7.

So by moving the PageWaiters bit up to bit #7, we can atomically clear
the lock bit and test the waiters bit on x86 too.  And architectures
with LL/SC (which is all the usual RISC suspects), the particular bit
doesn't matter, so they are fine with this approach too.

This avoids the extra access to the same atomic word, and thus avoids
the costly stall at page unlock time.

The only downside is that the interface ends up being a bit odd and
specialized: clear a bit in a byte, and test the sign bit.  Nick doesn't
love the resulting name of the new primitive, but I'd rather make the
name be descriptive and very clear about the limitation imposed by
trying to work across all relevant architectures than make it be some
generic thing that doesn't make the odd semantics explicit.

So this introduces the new architecture primitive

    clear_bit_unlock_is_negative_byte();

and adds the trivial implementation for x86.  We have a generic
non-optimized fallback (that just does a "clear_bit()"+"test_bit(7)"
combination) which can be overridden by any architecture that can do
better.  According to Nick, Power has the same hickup x86 has, for
example, but some other architectures may not even care.

All these optimizations mean that my page locking stress-test (which is
just executing a lot of small short-lived shell scripts: "make test" in
the git source tree) no longer makes our page locking look horribly bad.
Before all these optimizations, just the unlock_page() costs were just
over 3% of all CPU overhead on "make test".  After this, it's down to
0.66%, so just a quarter of the cost it used to be.

(The difference on NUMA is bigger, but there this micro-optimization is
likely less noticeable, since the big issue on NUMA was not the accesses
to 'struct page', but the waitqueue accesses that were already removed
by Nick's earlier commit).

Acked-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Bob Peterson <rpeterso@redhat.com>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrew Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruenba@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      b91e1302
  13. Dec 27, 2016
  15. Dec 26, 2016
    • Larry Finger's avatar
      powerpc: Fix build warning on 32-bit PPC · 8ae679c4
      Larry Finger authored 
      

I am getting the following warning when I build kernel 4.9-git on my
PowerBook G4 with a 32-bit PPC processor:

    AS      arch/powerpc/kernel/misc_32.o
  arch/powerpc/kernel/misc_32.S:299:7: warning: "CONFIG_FSL_BOOKE" is not defined [-Wundef]

This problem is evident after commit 989cea5c ("kbuild: prevent
lib-ksyms.o rebuilds"); however, this change in kbuild only exposes an
error that has been in the code since 2005 when this source file was
created.  That was with commit 9994a338 ("powerpc: Introduce
entry_{32,64}.S, misc_{32,64}.S, systbl.S").

The offending line does not make a lot of sense.  This error does not
seem to cause any errors in the executable, thus I am not recommending
that it be applied to any stable versions.

Thanks to Nicholas Piggin for suggesting this solution.

Fixes: 9994a338 ("powerpc: Introduce entry_{32,64}.S, misc_{32,64}.S, systbl.S")
Signed-off-by: default avatarLarry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>
Cc: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Cc: linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      8ae679c4
    • Thomas Gleixner's avatar
      ktime: Cleanup ktime_set() usage · 8b0e1953
      Thomas Gleixner authored 
      

ktime_set(S,N) was required for the timespec storage type and is still
useful for situations where a Seconds and Nanoseconds part of a time value
needs to be converted. For anything where the Seconds argument is 0, this
is pointless and can be replaced with a simple assignment.

Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
      8b0e1953
  17. Dec 25, 2016
  19. Dec 24, 2016
    • Josh Poimboeuf's avatar
      Revert "x86/unwind: Detect bad stack return address" · c280f773
      Josh Poimboeuf authored 
      

Revert the following commit:

  b6959a36 ("x86/unwind: Detect bad stack return address")

... because Andrey Konovalov reported an unwinder warning:

  WARNING: unrecognized kernel stack return address ffffffffa0000001 at ffff88006377fa18 in a.out:4467

The unwind was initiated from an interrupt which occurred while running in the
generated code for a kprobe.  The unwinder printed the warning because it
expected regs->ip to point to a valid text address, but instead it pointed to
the generated code.

Eventually we may want come up with a way to identify generated kprobe
code so the unwinder can know that it's a valid return address.  Until
then, just remove the warning.

Reported-by: default avatarAndrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJosh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/02f296848fbf49fb72dfeea706413ecbd9d4caf6.1482418739.git.jpoimboe@redhat.com


Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
      c280f773