Re: [RFC][PATCH v2 5/5] mutex: Give spinners a chance tospin_on_owner if need_resched() triggered while queued

[Jason Low]

On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 12:51 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 02:51:35PM -0800, Jason Low wrote:
> > > But urgh, nasty problem. Lemme ponder this a bit.
> 
> OK, please have a very careful look at the below. It survived a boot
> with udev -- which usually stresses mutex contention enough to explode
> (in fact it did a few time when I got the contention/cancel path wrong),
> however I have not ran anything else on it.

I tested this patch on a 2 socket, 8 core machine with the AIM7 fserver
workload. After 100 users, the system gets soft lockups.

Some condition may be causing threads to not leave the "goto unqueue"
loop. I added a debug counter, and threads were able to reach more than
1,000,000,000 "goto unqueue".

I also was initially thinking if there can be problems when multiple
threads need_resched() and unqueue at the same time. As an example, 2
nodes that need to reschedule are next to each other in the middle of
the MCS queue. The 1st node executes "while (!(next =
ACCESS_ONCE(node->next)))" and exits the while loop because next is not
NULL. Then, the 2nd node execute its "if (cmpxchg(&prev->next, node,
NULL) != node)". We may then end up in a situation where the node before
the 1st node gets linked with the outdated 2nd node.

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