Re: [PATCH 00/11] locking/ww_mutex: Keep sorted wait list to avoid stampedes

From: Nicolai HÃhnle
Date: Wed Nov 30 2016 - 07:01:09 EST


On 30.11.2016 10:40, Chris Wilson wrote:
On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 01:20:01PM +0100, Nicolai Hähnle wrote:
I've included timings taken from a contention-heavy stress test to some of
the patches. The stress test performs actual GPU operations which take a
good chunk of the wall time, but even so, the series still manages to
improve the wall time quite a bit.

In looking at your contention scenarios, what was the average/max list
size? Just wondering if it makes sense to use an rbtree + first_waiter
instead of a sorted list from the start.

I haven't measured this with the new series; previously, while I was debugging the deadlock on older kernels, I occasionally saw wait lists of up to ~20 tasks, spit-balling the average over all the deadlock cases I'd say the average was not more than ~5. The average _without_ deadlocks should be lower, if anything.

I saw that your test cases go quite a bit higher, but even the rather extreme load I was testing with -- which is not quite a load from an actual application, though it is related to one -- has 40 threads and so a theoretical maximum of 40.

Nicolai

-Chris