Re: [PATCH v2] pstore: Revert pmsg_lock back to a normal mutex

[John Stultz]

On Sun, Mar 5, 2023 at 8:36 AM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sat,  4 Mar 2023 03:10:29 +0000
> John Stultz <jstultz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > This reverts commit 76d62f24db07f22ccf9bc18ca793c27d4ebef721.
> >
> > So while priority inversion on the pmsg_lock is an occasional
> > problem that an rt_mutex would help with, in uses where logging
> > is writing to pmsg heavily from multiple threads, the pmsg_lock
> > can be heavily contended.
> >
> > Normal mutexes can do adaptive spinning, which keeps the
> > contention overhead fairly low maybe adding on the order of 10s
> > of us delay waiting, but the slowpath w/ rt_mutexes makes the
> > blocked tasks sleep & wake. This makes matters worse when there
> > is heavy contentention, as it just allows additional threads to
> > run and line up to try to take the lock.
>
> That is incorrect. rt_mutexes have pretty much the same adaptive spinning
> as normal mutexes. So that is *not* the reason for the difference in
> performance, and should not be stated so in this change log.

Good point. Apologies, I was trying to describe the *behavior* being
seen in the traces by switching between mutex and rt_mtuex, but I do
see how it reads as a description of the capabilities of the
primitive.

thanks
-john