tree 92bb4729c58a40b2983a47c20cf01bc56bc8d511
parent 625e88be1f41b53cec55827c984e4a89ea8ee9f9
author Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> 1524738857 +0100
committer Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> 1524815326 +0200

locking/qspinlock: Bound spinning on pending->locked transition in slowpath

If a locker taking the qspinlock slowpath reads a lock value indicating
that only the pending bit is set, then it will spin whilst the
concurrent pending->locked transition takes effect.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that such a transition will ever be
observed since concurrent lockers could continuously set pending and
hand over the lock amongst themselves, leading to starvation. Whilst
this would probably resolve in practice, it means that it is not
possible to prove liveness properties about the lock and means that lock
acquisition time is unbounded.

Rather than removing the pending->locked spinning from the slowpath
altogether (which has been shown to heavily penalise a 2-threaded
locking stress test on x86), this patch replaces the explicit spinning
with a call to atomic_cond_read_relaxed and allows the architecture to
provide a bound on the number of spins. For architectures that can
respond to changes in cacheline state in their smp_cond_load implementation,
it should be sufficient to use the default bound of 1.

Suggested-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: boqun.feng@gmail.com
Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
Cc: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1524738868-31318-4-git-send-email-will.deacon@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>