Re: [PATCH for 5.1 0/3] Restartable Sequences updates for 5.1

On Tue, Mar 05, 2019 at 05:32:10PM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

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* Adaptative mutex improvements

I have done a prototype using rseq to implement an adaptative mutex which
can detect preemption using a rseq critical section. This ensures the
thread doesn't continue to busy-loop after it returns from preemption, and
calls sys_futex() instead. This is part of a user-space prototype branch [2],
and does not require any kernel change.

I'm still not convinced that is actually the right way to go about
things. The kernel heuristic is spin while the _owner_ runs, and we
don't get preempted, obviously.

And the only userspace spinning that makes sense is to cover the cost of
the syscall. Now Obviously PTI wrecked everything, but before that
syscalls were actually plenty fast and you didn't need many cmpxchg
cycles to amortize the syscall itself -- which could then do kernel side
adaptive spinning (when required).

Indeed with PTI the system calls are back to their slow self. ;)

You point about owner is interesting. Perhaps there is one tweak that I
should add in there. We could write the owner thread ID in the lock word.

This is already required for PI (and I think robust) futexes. There have
been proposals for FUTEX_LOCK and FUTEX_UNLOCK (!PI) primitives that
require the same.

Waiman had some patches; but I think all went under because 'important'
stuff happened.

When trying to grab a lock, one of a few situations can happen:

- It's unlocked, so we grab it by storing our thread ID,
- It's locked, and we can fetch the CPU number of the thread owning it
  if we can access its (struct rseq *)->cpu_id through a lookup using its
  thread ID, We can then check whether it's the same CPU we are running on.

That might just work with threads (private futexes; which are the
majority these these I think), but will obviously not work with regular
(shared) futexes.

  - If so, we _know_ we should let the owner run, so we call futex right away,
    no spinning. We can even boost it for priority inheritance mutexes,
  - If it's owned by a thread which was last running on a different CPU,
    then it may make sense to actively try to grab the lock by spinning
    up to a certain number of loops (which can be either fixed or adaptative).
    After that limit, call futex. If preempted while looping, call futex.

Do you see this as an improvement over what exists today, or am I
on the wrong track ?

That's probably better than what they have today. Last time I looked at
libc pthread I got really sad -- arguably that was a long time ago, and
some of that stuff is because POSIX, but still.

Some day we should redesign all that.. futex2 etc.