[PATCH v2 00/14] locks: scalability improvements for file locking

[Jeff Layton]

Summary of Significant Changes:
-------------------------------
v2:
- Fix potential races in deadlock detection. Manipulation of global
  blocked_hash and deadlock detection are now atomic. This is a
  little slower than the earlier set, but is provably correct. Also,
  the patch that converts to using the i_lock has been split out from
  most of the other changes. That should make it easier to review, but
  it does leave a potential race in the deadlock detection that is fixed
  up by the following patch. It may make sense to fold patches 7 and 8
  together before merging.

- Add percpu hlists and lglocks for global file_lock_list. This gives
  us some speedup since this list is seldom read.

Abstract (tl;dr version):
-------------------------
This patchset represents an overhaul of the file locking code with an
aim toward improving its scalability and making the code a bit easier to
understand.

Longer version:
---------------
When the BKL was finally ripped out of the kernel in 2010, the strategy
taken for the file locking code was to simply turn it into a new
file_lock_locks spinlock. It was an expedient way to deal with the file
locking code at the time, but having a giant spinlock around all of this
code is clearly not great for scalability. Red Hat has bug reports that
go back into the 2.6.18 era that point to BKL scalability problems in
the file locking code and the file_lock_lock suffers from the same
issues.

This patchset is my first attempt to make this code less dependent on
global locking. The main change is to switch most of the file locking
code to be protected by the inode->i_lock instead of the file_lock_lock.

While that works for most things, there are a couple of global data
structures (lists in the current code) that need a global lock to
protect them. So we still need a global lock in order to deal with
those. The remaining patches are intended to make that global locking
less painful. The big gainis are made by turning the blocked_list into a
hashtable, which greatly speeds up the deadlock detection code.

This is not the first attempt at doing this. The conversion to the
i_lock was originally attempted by Bruce Fields a few years ago. His
approach was NAK'ed since it involved ripping out the deadlock
detection. People also really seem to like /proc/locks for debugging, so
keeping that in is probably worthwhile.

There's more work to be done in this area and this patchset is just a
start. There's a horrible thundering herd problem when a blocking lock
is released, for instance. There was also interest in solving the goofy
"unlock on any close" POSIX lock semantics at this year's LSF. I think
this patchset will help lay the groundwork for those changes as well.

While file locking is not usually considered to be a high-performance
codepath, it *is* an IPC mechanism and I think it behooves us to try to
make it as fast as possible.

I'd like to see this considered for 3.11. Comments and suggestions
welcome.

Performance testing and results:
--------------------------------
In order to measure performance here, I've written some locking
performance tests that I've made available here:

    git://git.samba.org/jlayton/lockperf.git

...there are only 4 tests so far that measure performance of BSD and
POSIX locking. I ran each test 100 times. The first number in each set
of results is the unpatched (baseline) and the second is the patched
results. The arch in both cases was x86_64. I've also done some testing
on i686 and the results are more or less inline with the ones below.
The files were all on tmpfs, to eliminate any storage-related latencies
that might creep in.

Here's a description of each test with their results. I've also included
the standard deviation with each:

posix01: fork off 128 children, and have them all open the same file and
lock and unlock it 10k times (whole file, FL_WRLCK). Measure the time
that it takes to perform all of the locks and unlocks in each process,
and the total them all up. Note that the "mean time" here is not the
time to run the test, but the total time that all the tasks spent
locking and unlocking:

2-way Intel machine, 1G RAM, UMA:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	780.50511606027		20.0773085693901
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	420.178537863755	24.4692621642102

32-way AMD Opteron machine, 32G RAM in 4 NUMA nodes:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	30889.1603525361	267.767126085587
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	25504.7748006928	336.232893246214

The first thing to note here is how painful this test is as the number
of CPUs scales out, and when NUMA is thrown into the mix. It takes a
staggeringly long time to run on such a machine. The patchset helps this
use-case a lot, but it's still painful. I think these numbers help
illustrate why we need to worry about this as the machines get more
parallel.

posix02: fork off 128 children, and have them each open their own file
and lock and unlock it 20k times. Measure the time that it takes to
complete the locks and unlocks in each process and then total them up:

2-way Intel machine, 1G RAM, UMA:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	319.86610077757		11.0827165395713
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	257.24231139548		 8.0772950753018

32-way AMD Opteron machine, 32G RAM in 4 NUMA nodes:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	1354.73702552958	40.5202787251742
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	 541.35526474265	12.0492755786782

...so again, multiple CPUs and NUMA take their toll on this workload,
but the results are still universally positive from the patchset.

flock01: fork off 128 children, and have them all open the same file and
lock (LOCK_EX) and unlock it 10k times. Measure the time that it takes
to perform all of the locks and unlocks in each process, and the total
them all up. Note that the "mean time" here is not the time to run the
test, but the total time that all the tasks spent locking and unlocking:

2-way Intel machine, 1G RAM, UMA:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	704.60957498018		10.6182455520549
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	729.30782576048		 4.62185698266119

32-way AMD Opteron machine, 32G RAM in 4 NUMA nodes:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	23617.876013741		221.445828515533
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	24743.3849476248	340.664907591012

...so here we see some slight slowdown (3-5%). In the case of the UMA
box, it's on the order of the standard deviation, and in a similar test
on a different box, the patched kernel turned out to be faster. Go
figure...

In any case, I'm suspect that this is due to the fact that with this
set, we need to take two spinlocks in order to do the work (the i_lock
and the file_lock_lglock). Since the flock codepath doesn't use the
global blocked_list, it sees no benefit to the conversion of it to a
hash table.

flock02: fork off 128 children, and have them each open their own file
and lock (LOCK_EX) and unlock it 20k times. Measure the time that it
takes to complete the locks and unlocks in each process and then total
them up:

2-way Intel machine, 1G RAM, UMA:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	241.26319896997		7.69747220750147
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	167.23062027739		5.1643997156006

32-way AMD Opteron machine, 32G RAM in 4 NUMA nodes:
kernel				mean time		std. deviation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.10.0-rc4-00034-g042dd60	1348.64594042422	39.5186585988528
3.10.0-rc4-00049-ge0b71e1	   8.4762987879		 0.347121187462215

...the speedup here is really dramatic, especially in the NUMA case.
This was so much faster that I had to double check that flock locking
still worked properly afterward.

Jeff Layton (14):
  cifs: use posix_unblock_lock instead of locks_delete_block
  locks: make generic_add_lease and generic_delete_lease static
  locks: comment cleanups and clarifications
  locks: make "added" in __posix_lock_file a bool
  locks: encapsulate the fl_link list handling
  locks: don't walk inode->i_flock list in locks_show
  locks: convert to i_lock to protect i_flock list
  locks: ensure that deadlock detection is atomic with respect to
    blocked_list modification
  locks: convert fl_link to a hlist_node
  locks: turn the blocked_list into a hashtable
  locks: add a new "lm_owner_key" lock operation
  locks: give the blocked_hash its own spinlock
  seq_file: add seq_list_*_percpu helpers
  locks: move file_lock_list to a set of percpu hlist_heads and convert
    file_lock_lock to an lglock

 Documentation/filesystems/Locking |   27 +++-
 fs/afs/flock.c                    |    5 +-
 fs/ceph/locks.c                   |    2 +-
 fs/ceph/mds_client.c              |    8 +-
 fs/cifs/cifsfs.c                  |    2 +-
 fs/cifs/file.c                    |   15 +-
 fs/gfs2/file.c                    |    2 +-
 fs/lockd/svclock.c                |   12 ++
 fs/lockd/svcsubs.c                |   12 +-
 fs/locks.c                        |  306 +++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
 fs/nfs/delegation.c               |   11 +-
 fs/nfs/nfs4state.c                |    8 +-
 fs/nfsd/nfs4state.c               |    8 +-
 fs/seq_file.c                     |   54 +++++++
 include/linux/fs.h                |   38 +++--
 include/linux/seq_file.h          |    6 +
 16 files changed, 362 insertions(+), 154 deletions(-)

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