On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 11:49:51AM -0800, Peter Oskolkov wrote:

TL;DR: our models are different here. In your model a single server
can have a bunch of workers interacting with it; in my model only a
single RUNNING worker is assigned to a server, which it wakes when it
blocks.

So part of the problem is that none of that was evident from the code.
It is also completely different from the scheduler code it lives in,
making it double confusing.

After having read the code, I still had no clue what so ever how it was
supposed to be used. Which is where my reverse engineering started :/

More details:

"Working servers" cannot get wakeups, because a "working server" has a
single RUNNING worker attached to it. When a worker blocks, it wakes
its attached server and becomes a detached blocked worker (same is
true if the worker is "preempted": it blocks and wakes its assigned
server).

But who would do the preemption if the server isn't allowed to run?

Blocked workers upon wakeup do this, in order:

- always add themselves to the runnable worker list (the list is
shared among ALL servers, it is NOT per server);

That seems like a scalability issue. And, as said, it is completely
alien when compared to the way Linux itself does scheduling.

- wake a server pointed to by idle_server_ptr, if not NULL;
- sleep, waiting for a wakeup from a server;

Server S, upon becoming IDLE (no worker to run, or woken on idle
server list) does this, in order, in userspace (simplified, see
umcg_get_idle_worker() in
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20211122211327.5931-5-posk@google.com/ (local)):
- take a userspace (spin) lock (so the steps below are all within a
single critical section):

Don't ever suggest userspace spinlocks, they're horrible crap.

- compare_xchg(idle_server_ptr, NULL, S);
  - if failed, there is another server in idle_server_ptr, so S adds
itself to the userspace idle server list, releases the lock, goes to
sleep;
  - if succeeded:
    - check the runnable worker list;
        - if empty, release the lock, sleep;
        - if not empty:
           - get the list
           - xchg(idle_server_ptr, NULL) (either S removes itself, or
a worker in the kernel does it first, does not matter);
           - release the lock;
           - wake server S1 on idle server list. S1 goes through all
of these steps.

The protocol above serializes the userspace dealing with the idle
server ptr/list. Wakeups in the kernel will be caught if there are
idle servers. Yes, the protocol in the userspace is complicated (more
complicated than outlined above, as the reaped idle/runnable worker
list from the kernel is added to the userspace idle/runnable worker
list), but the kernel side is very simple. I've tested this
interaction extensively, I'm reasonably sure that no worker wakeups
are lost.

Sure, but also seems somewhat congestion prone :/