On 06/09/2015 08:04 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

On Mon, Jun 08, 2015 at 06:20:44PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:

quoted

The current cmpxchg() loop in setting the _QW_WAITING flag for writers
in queue_write_lock_slowpath() will contend with incoming readers
causing possibly extra cmpxchg() operations that are wasteful. This
patch changes the code to do a byte cmpxchg() to eliminate contention
with new readers.

This is very narrow, would not the main cost still be the cacheline
transfers?

Do you have any numbers to back this? I would feel much better about
this if there's real numbers attached.

I have just sent out a v2 patch with the microbenchmark data for the 2nd 
patch. The extra cmpxchg() because of reader contention should have 
about the same cost of a cacheline miss. The performance gain depends on 
how often this kind of reader contention happens.

Regards,
Longman