Hi,

On 03/30/2018 09:09 PM, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:

On Wed, 28 Mar 2018, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 23 Mar 2018, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

quoted

Today the last process to update a semaphore is remembered and
reported in the pid namespace of that process.  If there are processes
in any other pid namespace querying that process id with GETPID the
result will be unusable nonsense as it does not make any
sense in your own pid namespace.

Yeah that sounds pretty wrong.

quoted

Due to ipc_update_pid I don't think you will be able to get System V
ipc semaphores into a troublesome cache line ping-pong.  Using struct
pids from separate process are not a problem because they do not share
a cache line.  Using struct pid from different threads of the same
process are unlikely to be a problem as the reference count update
can be avoided.

Further linux futexes are a much better tool for the job of mutual
exclusion between processes than System V semaphores.  So I expect
programs that  are performance limited by their interprocess mutual
exclusion primitive will be using futexes.

The performance of sysv sem and futexes for the contended case is more 
or less identical, it depends on the CONFIG_ options what is faster.

And this is obvious, both primitives must do the same tasks:
sleep:
- lookup a kernel pointer from a user space reference
- acquire a lock, do some housekeeping, unlock and sleep
wakeup:
- lookup a kernel pointer from a user space reference
- acquire a lock, do some housekeeping, especially unlink the to be 
woken up task, unlock and wakeup

The woken up task has nothing to do, it returns immediately to user space.

IIRC for the uncontended case, sysvsem was at ~300 cpu cycles, but that 
number is a few years old, and I don't know what is the impact of spectre.
The futex code is obviously faster.
But I don't know which real-world applications do their own 
optimizations for the uncontended case before using sysvsem.

Thus the only "real" challenge is to minimize cache line trashing.

quoted

You would be wrong. There are plenty of real workloads out there
that do not use futexes and are care about performance; in the end
futexes are only good for the uncontended cases, it can also
destroy numa boxes if you consider the global hash table. Experience
as shown me that sysvipc sems are quite still used.

quoted

So while it is possible that enhancing the storage of the last
rocess of a System V semaphore from an integer to a struct pid
will cause a performance regression because of the effect
of frequently updating the pid reference count.  I don't expect
that to happen in practice.

How's that? Now thanks to ipc_update_pid() for each semop the user
passes, perform_atomic_semop() will do two atomic updates for the
cases where there are multiple processes updating the sem. This is
not uncommon.

Could you please provide some numbers.

[...]

So at least for a large box this patch hurts the cases where there is low
to medium cpu usage (no more than ~8 processes on a 40 core box) in a non
trivial way. For more processes it doesn't matter. We can confirm that 
the
case for threads is irrelevant. While I'm not happy about the 30% 
regression
I guess we can live with this.

Manfred, any thoughts?

Bugfixing has always first priority, and a 30% regression in one 
microbenchmark doesn't seem to be that bad.

Thus I would propose that we fix SEMPID first, and _if_ someone notices 
a noticeable regression, then we must improve the code.

--
     Manfred