[PATCH-tip v6 15/22] TP-futex, doc: Add TP futexes documentation
From: Waiman Long
Date: Wed Mar 22 2017 - 13:43:43 EST
This patch adds a new document file on how to use the TP futexes.
In term of locking performance, a futex locking microbenchmark
was written where separate userspace mutexes are implemented using
wait-wake (WW), PI and TP futexes respectively. This microbenchmark
was intructed to run 10s of locking operations with a load-to-load
latency of 10 on a 2-socket 36-core E5-2699 v3 system (HT off).
The added latency was there to reduce the chance that a given CPU could
monopolize the lock over multiple consecutive locking operations.
The system was running on a 4.11 based kernel. the results of the
benchmark runs were as follows:
WW futex PI futex TP futex Glibc
-------- -------- -------- -----
Total locking ops 49,065,154 372,301 57,209,013 39,667,389
Per-thread avg/sec 136,291 1,034 158,897 110,186
Per-thread min/sec 131,597 1,033 139,441 106,397
Per-thread max/sec 140,414 1,051 176,816 117,527
% Stddev 0.22% 0.05% 1.27% 0.36%
lock slowpaths 10,292,953 372,114 11,864,228 -
unlock slowpaths 14,306,857 372,110 25 -
Besides a 17% performance increase, another major difference between
WW and TP futexes was the dramatic reduction in the number of unlock
slowpaths that were being taken.
By increasing the load latency (amount of time spent in the critical
section) from a default of 1, the performance discrepancies between
WW and TP futexes actually increases in the x86 system as shown in
the tables below.
Load Latency WW locking ops TP locking ops % change
------------ -------------- -------------- --------
5 40,365,507 54,993,009 +36%
10 33,193,154 47,696,618 +44%
20 25,855,039 37,553,477 +45%
30 21,157,759 31,667,873 +50%
40 18,216,561 27,408,570 +50%
50 16,103,078 24,299,436 +51%
100 10,233,914 14,375,505 +40%
1us sleep 178,018 174,938 -2%
The performance advantage increased to about 50% and then started
dropping off. The TP futexes, however, are not designed for sleeping
lock holders as there are no performance advantage.
On a 2-socket 10-core and 80-thread Power8 system, the benchmark
results were:
WW futex PI futex TP futex Glibc
-------- -------- -------- -----
Total locking ops 12,939,135 1,758,607 21,502,680 10,896,395
Per-thread avg/sec 16,172 2,198 26,851 13,619
Per-thread min/sec 13,527 2,197 23,101 11,524
Per-thread max/sec 19,519 2,220 27,629 15,952
% Stddev 0.93% 0.01% 0.25% 0.87%
lock slowpaths 2,856,730 1,758,403 7,092,852 -
unlock slowpaths 4,279,445 1,758,403 13 -
Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/00-INDEX | 2 +
Documentation/tp-futex.txt | 180 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2 files changed, 182 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 Documentation/tp-futex.txt
diff --git a/Documentation/00-INDEX b/Documentation/00-INDEX
index 793acf9..436d2ed 100644
--- a/Documentation/00-INDEX
+++ b/Documentation/00-INDEX
@@ -416,6 +416,8 @@ this_cpu_ops.txt
- List rationale behind and the way to use this_cpu operations.
thermal/
- directory with information on managing thermal issues (CPU/temp)
+tp-futex.txt
+ - Documentation on lightweight throughput-optimized futexes.
trace/
- directory with info on tracing technologies within linux
translations/
diff --git a/Documentation/tp-futex.txt b/Documentation/tp-futex.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d040c18
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/tp-futex.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,180 @@
+Started by: Waiman Long <longman@xxxxxxxxxx>
+
+Throughput-Optimized Futexes
+----------------------------
+
+There are two main problems for a wait-wake futex (FUTEX_WAIT and
+FUTEX_WAKE) when used for creating user-space locking primitives:
+
+ 1) With a wait-wake futex, tasks waiting for a lock are put to sleep
+ in the futex queue to be woken up by the lock owner when it is done
+ with the lock. Waking up a sleeping task, however, introduces some
+ additional latency which can be large especially if the critical
+ section protected by the lock is relatively short. This may cause
+ a performance bottleneck on large systems with many CPUs running
+ applications that need a lot of inter-thread synchronization.
+
+ 2) The performance of the wait-wake futex is currently
+ spinlock-constrained. When many threads are contending for a
+ futex in a large system with many CPUs, it is not unusual to have
+ spinlock contention accounting for more than 90% of the total
+ CPU cycles consumed at various points in time.
+
+This two problems can create performance bottlenecks with a
+futex-constrained workload especially on systems with large number
+of CPUs.
+
+The goal of the throughput-optimized (TP) futexes is maximize the
+locking throughput at the expense of fairness and deterministic
+latency. This is done by encouraging lock stealing and optimistic
+spinning on a locked futex when the futex owner is running. This is
+the same optimistic spinning mechanism used by the kernel mutex and rw
+semaphore implementations to improve performance. Optimistic spinning
+was done without taking any lock.
+
+Lock stealing is known to be a performance enhancement technique as
+long as the safeguards are in place to make sure that there will be no
+lock starvation. The TP futexes has a built-in lock hand-off mechanism
+to prevent lock starvation from happening as long as the underlying
+kernel mutexes that the TP futexes use have no lock starvation problem.
+
+When the top lock waiter has failed to acquire the lock within a
+certain time threshold, it will initiate the hand-off mechanism by
+forcing the unlocker to transfer the lock to itself instead of freeing
+it for others to grab. This limit the maximum latency a waiter has
+to wait.
+
+Because of optimistic spinning, the lock holders are much less likely
+to go into the kernel to wake up sleeping waiters when performing
+unlock operation. This also helps to increase throughput.
+
+The downside of this improved throughput is the increased variance
+of the actual response times of the locking operations. Some locking
+operations will be very fast, while others may be considerably slower.
+The average response time should be better than the wait-wake futexes.
+
+Performance-wise, TP futexes should be faster than wait-wake futexes
+especially if the futex locker holders do not sleep. For workload
+that does a lot of sleeping within the critical sections, the TP
+futexes may not be faster than the wait-wake futexes.
+
+Implementation
+--------------
+
+Like the PI and robust futexes, an exclusive lock acquirer has to
+atomically put its thread ID (TID) into the lower 30 bits of the
+32-bit futex which should has an original value of 0. If it succeeds,
+it will be the owner of the futex. Otherwise, it has to call into
+the kernel using the FUTEX_LOCK futex(2) syscall.
+
+ futex(uaddr, FUTEX_LOCK, uslock, timeout, NULL, 0);
+
+The two parameters that can be set are:
+ 1) uslock - return EAGAIN to perform userspace locking when set,
+ otherwise locking will be done in the kernel.
+ 2) timeout - specify the timeout value (relative to current time)
+ and ETIMEDOUT will be returned if lock cannot be acquired or
+ available within the timeout period.
+
+Userspace locking can improve throughput by reducing lock hold time,
+but it also has the risk of lock starvation. So kernel locking should
+be used after a number of userspace locking failures.
+
+Inside the kernel, a kernel mutex is used for serialization among
+the futex waiters. Only the top lock waiter which is the owner of
+the serialization mutex is allowed to continuously spin and attempt
+to acquire the lock. Other lock waiters will have one attempt to
+steal the lock before entering the mutex queues.
+
+When the exclusive futex lock owner is no longer running, the top
+waiter will set the FUTEX_WAITERS bit before going to sleep. This is
+to make sure the futex owner will go into the kernel at unlock time
+to wake up the top waiter.
+
+The return values of the above futex locking syscall, if non-negative,
+are status code that consists of 2 fields - the lock acquisition code
+(bits 0-7) and the number of sleeps (bits 8-30) in the optimistic
+spinning loop before acquiring the futex. A negative returned value
+means an error has happened.
+
+The lock acquisition code can have the following values:
+ a) 0 - lock stolen as non-top waiter
+ b) 1 - lock acquired as the top waiter
+ c) 2 - lock explicitly handed off by the unlocker
+
+When it is time to unlock, the exclusive lock owner has to atomically
+change the futex value from its TID to 0. If that fails, it has to
+issue a FUTEX_UNLOCK futex(2) syscall to wake up the top waiter.
+
+ futex(uaddr, FUTEX_UNLOCK, 0, NULL, NULL, 0);
+
+A return value of 1 from the FUTEX_UNLOCK futex(2) syscall indicates
+a task has been woken up. The syscall returns 0 if no sleeping task
+is woken. A negative value will be returned if an error happens.
+
+The error number returned by a FUTEX_UNLOCK syscall on an empty futex
+can be used to decide if the TP futex functionality is implemented
+in the kernel. If it is present, an EPERFM error will be returned.
+Otherwise it will return ENOSYS.
+
+TP futexes require the kernel to have SMP support as well as support
+for the cmpxchg functionality. For architectures that don't support
+cmpxchg, TP futexes will not be supported as well.
+
+The exclusive locking TP futexes are orthogonal to the robust futexes
+and can be combined without problem. The TP futexes also have code
+to detect the death of an exclusive TP futex owner and handle the
+transfer of futex ownership automatically without the use of the
+robust futexes. The only case that the TP futexes cannot handle alone
+is the PID wrap-around issue where another process with the same PID
+as the real futex owner because of PID wrap-around is mis-identified
+as the owner of a futex.
+
+If a signal comes at the right instance in time, it is possible that a
+lock handoff has happened but the top waiter returns an error instead.
+So the userspace locking code will need to check for this very unlikely
+situation. It is possible for the kernel to handle this internally,
+but it will probably reduce performance. Userspace code can handle
+this more efficiently.
+
+Usage Scenario
+--------------
+
+A TP futex can be used to implement a user-space exclusive lock
+or mutex to guard a critical section which are unlikely to go to
+sleep. The waiters in a TP futex, however, will fall back to sleep in
+a wait queue if the lock owner isn't running. Therefore, it can also be
+used when the critical section is long and prone to sleeping. However,
+it may not have the performance gain when compared with a wait-wake
+futex in this case.
+
+The wait-wake futexes are more versatile as they can also be used to
+implement other locking primitives like semaphores or conditional
+variables. So the TP futex is not a direct replacement of the
+wait-wake futex. However for userspace mutexes or rwlocks, the TP
+futex is likely a better option than the wait-wake futex.
+
+Sample Code
+-----------
+
+The following are sample code to implement simple mutex lock and
+unlock functions.
+
+__thread int thread_id;
+
+void mutex_lock(int *faddr)
+{
+ if (cmpxchg(faddr, 0, thread_id) == 0)
+ return;
+ while (futex(faddr, FUTEX_LOCK, 0, NULL, NULL, 0) > 0)
+ ;
+}
+
+void mutex_unlock(int *faddr)
+{
+ int old, fval;
+
+ if (cmpxchg(faddr, thread_id, 0) == thread_id)
+ return;
+ futex(faddr, FUTEX_UNLOCK, 0, NULL, NULL, 0);
+}
--
1.8.3.1