Re: [RFC] mempolicy: convert the shared_policy lock to a rwlock

[David Rientjes]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015, Nathan Zimmer wrote:

> When running the SPECint_rate gcc on some very large boxes it was noticed
> that the system was spending lots of time in mpol_shared_policy_lookup.
> The gamess benchmark can also show it and is what I mostly used to chase
> down the issue since the setup for that I found a easier.
> 
> To be clear the binaries were on tmpfs because of disk I/O reqruirements.
> We then used text replication to avoid icache misses and having all the
> copies banging on the memory where the instruction code resides.
> This results in us hitting a bottle neck in mpol_shared_policy_lookup
> since lookup is serialised by the shared_policy lock.
> 
> I have only reproduced this on very large (3k+ cores) boxes.  The problem
> starts showing up at just a few hundred ranks getting worse until it
> threatens to livelock once it gets large enough.
> For example on the gamess benchmark at 128 ranks this area consumes only
> ~1% of time, at 512 ranks it consumes nearly 13%, and at 2k ranks it is
> over 90%.
> 
> To alleviate the contention on this area I converted the spinslock to a
> rwlock.  This allows the large number of lookups to happen simultaneously.
> The results were quite good reducing this to consumtion at max ranks to
> around 2%.
> 

There're a couple of places in the sp_lookup() comment that would need to 
be fixed to either correct that this is no longer a spinlock and that the 
caller must hold the read lock.  The comment for sp_insert() would have to 
be fixed to specify the caller must hold the write lock.  When that's 
fixed, feel free to add

Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/