Re: [PATCH 1/5] locking/rtmutex: Stop spinning on the owner when the waiter is woken

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri,  6 Nov 2026 18:59:27 -0500
Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The top waiter of an rt_mutex spins while the owner runs,
> rtmutex_spin_on_owner(), and does not stop when it is woken: its timeout
> and a signal find it running, set it TASK_RUNNING, and the spin goes on
> until the owner leaves its CPU or the waiter's own CPU has to
> reschedule. A PI futex owner is a user task that may run as long as it
> likes. On v7.4-rc1, in 8-CPU VMs, behind an owner spinning in userspace,
> a 1ms pthread_mutex_timedlock() returns ETIMEDOUT 126ms to 631ms late on
> average, 1.4s at most, a SIGUSR1 is handled up to 1.9s late, and a
> waiter killed with SIGKILL is reaped 0.5s late on average. With
> PREEMPT_RT the wound of a ww_mutex is missed the same way: two contexts
> in an ABBA on two CPUs at SCHED_FIFO spin on each other, and the older
> one gets its second lock after 96ms on average, 0.95s at most.
> 

The above is very verbose. Are you starting to use AI? ;-)

> Stop spinning once the waiter is woken, where the sleep the spin stands
> in for would end: rt_mutex_slowlock_block() then sees the timeout, the
> signal or the wound, as after schedule(). An rtlock waiter is woken out
> of TASK_RTLOCK_WAIT by the lock handover alone, and spins as before.

OK, because its state is set to TASK_RUNNING the schedule_rtlock() will
simply return.

> 
> With this patch the 1ms waits end after 1.01ms on average, a signal is
> handled within 0.3ms (1.4ms with PREEMPT_RT), and the ww_mutex ABBA
> resolves in 12us to 33us; a contended PI mutex keeps its throughput.
> The futex_lock_pi_inherit and test-ww_mutex cases added later in this
> series catch both.
> 
> Fixes: 992caf7f1724 ("locking/rtmutex: Add adaptive spinwait mechanism")
> Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  kernel/locking/rtmutex.c | 4 ++++
>  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/kernel/locking/rtmutex.c b/kernel/locking/rtmutex.c
> index 5a9534c715b8..323973be2074 100644
> --- a/kernel/locking/rtmutex.c
> +++ b/kernel/locking/rtmutex.c
> @@ -1516,9 +1516,13 @@ static bool rtmutex_spin_on_owner(struct rt_mutex_base *lock,
>  		 *  - current is not longer the top waiter
>  		 *  - current is requested to reschedule (redundant
>  		 *    for CONFIG_PREEMPT_RCU=y)
> +		 *  - current is woken, by its timeout, a signal or
> +		 *    whatever else would end the sleep the spin
> +		 *    stands in for
>  		 *  - the VCPU on which owner runs is preempted
>  		 */
>  		if (!owner_on_cpu(owner) || need_resched() ||
> +		    task_is_running(current) ||

So the task enters here with its state non-running, even for
rt_spin_locks, and you break out of the spin if something woke it up.
Breaking out of the spin with the state as TASK_RUNNING just makes it
reanalyze the situation and for rt_spin_locks it will put itself back
to RTLOCK_WAIT and spin again, if the owner hasn't left the CPU.

Makes sense.

Reviewed-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx>

-- Steve


>  		    !data_race(rt_mutex_waiter_is_top_waiter(lock, waiter))) {
>  			res = false;
>  			break;