Re: Severe performance regression w/ 4.4+ on Android due to cgroup locking changes

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 04:39:44PM -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:

> > There is a synchronize_sched() in there, so sorta. That thing is heavily
> > geared towards readers, as is the only 'sane' choice for global locks.
> 
> It used to use the expedited variant until 001dac627ff3
> ("locking/percpu-rwsem: Make use of the rcu_sync infrastructure"), so
> it might have been okay before then.

Right, but expedited stuff sprays IPIs around the entire system. That's
stuff other people complain about.

> The options that I can see are
> 
> 1. Somehow make percpu_rwsem's write behavior more responsive in a way
>    which is acceptable all use cases.  This would be great but
>    probably impossible.
> 
> 2. Add a fast-writer option to percpu_rwsem so that users which care
>    about write latency can opt in for higher processing overhead for
>    lower latency.

So, IIRC, the trade-off is a full memory barrier in read_lock and
read_unlock() vs sync_sched() in write.

Full memory barriers are expensive and while the combined cost might
well exceed the cost of the sync_sched() it doesn't suffer the latency
issues.

Not sure if we can frob the two in a single codebase, but I can have a
poke if Oleg or Paul doesn't beat me to it.