[PATCH 1/2] locking: Implement an algorithm choice for Wound-Wait mutexes
Thomas Hellstrom
thellstrom at vmware.com
Thu Jun 14 11:48:39 UTC 2018
On 06/14/2018 12:51 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 04:05:43PM +0200, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
>> In short, with Wait-Die (before the patch) it's the process _taking_ the
>> contended lock that backs off if necessary. No preemption required. With
>> Wound-Wait, it's the process _holding_ the contended lock that gets wounded
>> (preempted), and it needs to back off at its own discretion but no later
>> than when it's going to sleep on another ww mutex. That point is where we
>> intercept the preemption request. We're preempting the transaction rather
>> than the process.
> This:
>
> Wait-die:
> The newer transactions are killed when:
> It (= the newer transaction) makes a reqeust for a lock being held
> by an older transactions
>
> Wound-wait:
> The newer transactions are killed when:
> An older transaction makes a request for a lock being held by the
> newer transactions
>
> Would make for an excellent comment somewhere. No talking about
> preemption, although I think I know what you mean with it, that is not
> how preemption is normally used.
Ok. I'll incorporate something along this line. Unfortunately that last
statement is not fully true. It should read
"The newer transactions are wounded when:", not "killed" when.
The literature makes a distinction between "killed" and "wounded". In
our context, "Killed" is when a transaction actually receives an
-EDEADLK and needs to back off. "Wounded" is when someone (typically
another transaction) requests a transaction to kill itself. A wound will
often, but not always, lead to a kill. If the wounded transaction has
finished its locking sequence, or has the opportunity to grab
uncontended ww mutexes or steal contended (non-handoff) ww mutexes to
finish its transaction it will do so and never kill itself.
>
> In scheduling speak preemption is when we pick a runnable (but !running)
> task to run instead of the current running task. In this case however,
> our T2 is blocked on a lock acquisition (one owned by our T1) and T1 is
> the only runnable task. Only when T1's progress is inhibited by T2 (T1
> wants a lock held by T2) do we wound/wake T2.
Indeed. The preemption spoken about in the Wound-Wait litterature means
that a transaction preempts another transaction when it wounds it. In
distributed computing my understanding is that the preempted transaction
is aborted instantly and restarted after a random delay. Of course, we
have no means of mapping wounding to process preemption in the linux
kernel, so that's why I referred to it as "lazy preemption". In process
analogy "wounded" wound roughly correspond to (need_resched() == true),
and returning -EDEADLK would correspond to voluntary preemption.
>
> In any case, I had a little look at the current ww_mutex code and ended
> up with the below patch that hopefully clarifies things a little.
>
> ---
> diff --git a/kernel/locking/mutex.c b/kernel/locking/mutex.c
> index f44f658ae629..a20c04619b2a 100644
> --- a/kernel/locking/mutex.c
> +++ b/kernel/locking/mutex.c
> @@ -244,6 +244,10 @@ void __sched mutex_lock(struct mutex *lock)
> EXPORT_SYMBOL(mutex_lock);
> #endif
>
> +/*
> + * Associate the ww_mutex @ww with the context @ww_ctx under which we acquired
> + * it.
> + */
IMO use of "acquire_context" or "context" is a little unfortunate when
the literature uses "transaction",
but otherwise fine.
> static __always_inline void
> ww_mutex_lock_acquired(struct ww_mutex *ww, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ww_ctx)
> {
> @@ -282,26 +286,36 @@ ww_mutex_lock_acquired(struct ww_mutex *ww, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ww_ctx)
> DEBUG_LOCKS_WARN_ON(ww_ctx->ww_class != ww->ww_class);
> #endif
> ww_ctx->acquired++;
> + lock->ctx = ctx;
> }
>
> +/*
> + * Determine if context @a is 'after' context @b. IOW, @a should be wounded in
> + * favour of @b.
> + */
So "wounded" should never really be used with Wait-Die
"Determine whether context @a represents a younger transaction than
context @b"?
> static inline bool __sched
> __ww_ctx_stamp_after(struct ww_acquire_ctx *a, struct ww_acquire_ctx *b)
> {
> - return a->stamp - b->stamp <= LONG_MAX &&
> - (a->stamp != b->stamp || a > b);
> +
> + return (signed long)(a->stamp - b->stamp) > 0;
> }
>
> /*
> - * Wake up any waiters that may have to back off when the lock is held by the
> - * given context.
> + * We just acquired @lock under @ww_ctx, if there are later contexts waiting
> + * behind us on the wait-list, wake them up so they can wound themselves.
Actually for Wait-Die, Back off or "Die" is the correct terminology.
> *
> - * Due to the invariants on the wait list, this can only affect the first
> - * waiter with a context.
> + * See __ww_mutex_add_waiter() for the list-order construction; basically the
> + * list is ordered by stamp smallest (oldest) first, so if there is a later
> + * (younger) stamp on the list behind us, wake it so it can wound itself.
> + *
> + * Because __ww_mutex_add_waiter() and __ww_mutex_check_stamp() wake any
> + * but the earliest context, this can only affect the first waiter (with a
> + * context).
The wait list invariants are stated in
Documentation/locking/ww-mutex-design.txt.
Perhaps we could copy those into the code to make the comment more
understandable:
" We maintain the following invariants for the wait list:
(1) Waiters with an acquire context are sorted by stamp order; waiters
without an acquire context are interspersed in FIFO order.
(2) For Wait-Die, among waiters with contexts, only the first one can
have
other locks acquired already (ctx->acquired > 0). Note that this
waiter
may come after other waiters without contexts in the list."
> *
> * The current task must not be on the wait list.
> */
> static void __sched
> -__ww_mutex_wakeup_for_backoff(struct mutex *lock, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ww_ctx)
> +__ww_mutex_wakeup_for_wound(struct mutex *lock, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ww_ctx)
Again, "wound" is unsuitable for Wait-Die. + numerous additional places.
Thanks,
Thomas
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