Thread (21 messages) flat view 21 messages, 3 authors, 2012-08-13

RFC: mutex: hung tasks on SMP platforms with asm-generic/mutex-xchg.h

From: Peter Zijlstra <hidden>
Date: 2012-08-07 13:48:55
Also in: lkml

On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 12:56 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
Hello,

ARM recently moved to asm-generic/mutex-xchg.h for its mutex implementation
after our previous implementation was found to be missing some crucial
memory barriers. 

This is a76d7bd96d ("ARM: 7467/1: mutex: use generic xchg-based
implementation for ARMv6+"), right? Why do you use xchg and not dec
based? The changelog mumbles something about shorter critical sections,
but me not knowing anything about ARM wonders about the why of that.
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
However, I'm seeing some problems running hackbench on
SMP platforms due to the way in which the MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER code operates.

The symptoms are that a bunch of hackbench tasks are left waiting on an
unlocked mutex and therefore never get woken up to claim it. I think this
boils down to the following sequence:


        Task A        Task B        Task C        Lock value
0                                                     1
1       lock()                                        0
2                     lock()                          0
3                     spin(A)                         0
4       unlock()                                      1
5                                   lock()            0
6                     cmpxchg(1,0)                    0
7                     contended()                    -1
8       lock()                                        0
9       spin(C)                                       0
10                                  unlock()          1
11      cmpxchg(1,0)                                  0
12      unlock()                                      1


At this point, the lock is unlocked, but Task B is in an uninterruptible
sleep with nobody to wake it up.

The following patch fixes the problem by ensuring we put the lock into
the contended state if we acquire it from the spin loop on the slowpath
but I'd like to be sure that this won't cause problems with other mutex
implementations:

diff --git a/kernel/mutex.c b/kernel/mutex.c
index a307cc9..27b7887 100644
--- a/kernel/mutex.c
+++ b/kernel/mutex.c
@@ -170,7 +170,7 @@ __mutex_lock_common(struct mutex *lock, long state, unsigned int subclass,
                if (owner && !mutex_spin_on_owner(lock, owner))
                        break;
 
-               if (atomic_cmpxchg(&lock->count, 1, 0) == 1) {
+               if (atomic_cmpxchg(&lock->count, 1, -1) == 1) {
                        lock_acquired(&lock->dep_map, ip);
                        mutex_set_owner(lock);
                        preempt_enable();
But in this case, either B is still spinning in our spin-loop, or it has
already passed the atomic_xchg(&lock->count, -1) when we fell out.

Since you say B is in UNINTERRUPTIBLE state, we'll assume it fell
through and so the lock count should be -1 (or less) to mark it
contended.
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