Re: [PATCH v2] locking/osq_lock: Optimize osq_lock performance using per-NUMA

From: Guo Hui
Date: Mon Mar 18 2024 - 21:48:59 EST



On 3/18/24 5:47 PM, David Laight wrote:
From: Guo Hui
Sent: 18 March 2024 05:50

Changes in version v1:
The queue is divided according to NUMA nodes,
but the tail of each NUMA node is still stored
in the structure optimistic_spin_queue.
The description should be before any 'changes'.
The changes between versions don't go into the commit message.

Does this change affect a real workload, or just some benchmark?

In reality you don't want a lot of threads waiting on a single
lock (of any kind).
So if a real workload is getting a long queue of waiters on
an OSQ lock then the underlying code really needs fixing to
'not do that' (either by changing the way the lock is held
or acquired).

The whole osq lock is actually quite strange.
(I worked out how it all worked a while ago.)
It is an ordered queue of threads waiting for the thread
spinning on a mutex/rwlock to either obtain the mutex or
to give up spinning and sleep.
I suspect that the main benefit over spinning on the mutex
itself is the fact that it is ordered.
It also remove the 'herd of wildebeest' doing a cmpxchg - but
one will win and the others do back to a non-locked poll.

Are the gains you are seeing from the osq-lock code itself,
or because the thread that ultimately holds the mutex is running
on the same NUMA node as the previous thread than held the mutex?

This is because the thread that ultimately holds the mutex is running on the same NUMA node as the previous thread than held the mutex.