Re: [RFC PATCH-tip v4 02/10] locking/rwsem: Stop active read lock ASAP

From: Waiman Long
Date: Fri Oct 07 2016 - 17:46:05 EST


On 10/06/2016 05:47 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 11:17:18AM -0700, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
On Thu, 18 Aug 2016, Waiman Long wrote:

Currently, when down_read() fails, the active read locking isn't undone
until the rwsem_down_read_failed() function grabs the wait_lock. If the
wait_lock is contended, it may takes a while to get the lock. During
that period, writer lock stealing will be disabled because of the
active read lock.

This patch will release the active read lock ASAP so that writer lock
stealing can happen sooner. The only downside is when the reader is
the first one in the wait queue as it has to issue another atomic
operation to update the count.

On a 4-socket Haswell machine running on a 4.7-rc1 tip-based kernel,
the fio test with multithreaded randrw and randwrite tests on the
same file on a XFS partition on top of a NVDIMM with DAX were run,
the aggregated bandwidths before and after the patch were as follows:

Test BW before patch BW after patch % change
---- --------------- -------------- --------
randrw 1210 MB/s 1352 MB/s +12%
randwrite 1622 MB/s 1710 MB/s +5.4%
Yeah, this is really a bad workload to make decisions on locking
heuristics imo - if I'm thinking of the same workload. Mainly because
concurrent buffered io to the same file isn't very realistic and you
end up pathologically pounding on i_rwsem (which used to be until
recently i_mutex until Al's parallel lookup/readdir). Obviously write
lock stealing wins in this case.
Except that it's DAX, and in 4.7-rc1 that used shared locking at the
XFS level and never took exclusive locks.

*However*, the DAX IO path locking in XFS has changed in 4.9-rc1 to
match the buffered IO single writer POSIX semantics - the test is a
bad test based on the fact it exercised a path that is under heavy
development and so can't be used as a regression test across
multiple kernels.

If you want to stress concurrent access to a single file, please
use direct IO, not DAX or buffered IO.

Thanks for the update. I will change the test when I update this patch.

Cheers,
Longman