On 03/21/2012 12:20 PM, Raghavendra K T wrote:

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <redacted>

Changes since last posting: (Raghavendra K T)
[
 - Rebased to linux-3.3-rc6.
 - used function+enum in place of macro (better type checking) 
 - use cmpxchg while resetting zero status for possible race
	[suggested by Dave Hansen for KVM patches ]
]

This series replaces the existing paravirtualized spinlock mechanism
with a paravirtualized ticketlock mechanism.

Ticket locks have an inherent problem in a virtualized case, because
the vCPUs are scheduled rather than running concurrently (ignoring
gang scheduled vCPUs).  This can result in catastrophic performance
collapses when the vCPU scheduler doesn't schedule the correct "next"
vCPU, and ends up scheduling a vCPU which burns its entire timeslice
spinning.  (Note that this is not the same problem as lock-holder
preemption, which this series also addresses; that's also a problem,
but not catastrophic).

(See Thomas Friebel's talk "Prevent Guests from Spinning Around"
http://www.xen.org/files/xensummitboston08/LHP.pdf for more details.)

Currently we deal with this by having PV spinlocks, which adds a layer
of indirection in front of all the spinlock functions, and defining a
completely new implementation for Xen (and for other pvops users, but
there are none at present).

PV ticketlocks keeps the existing ticketlock implemenentation
(fastpath) as-is, but adds a couple of pvops for the slow paths:

- If a CPU has been waiting for a spinlock for SPIN_THRESHOLD
  iterations, then call out to the __ticket_lock_spinning() pvop,
  which allows a backend to block the vCPU rather than spinning.  This
  pvop can set the lock into "slowpath state".

- When releasing a lock, if it is in "slowpath state", the call
  __ticket_unlock_kick() to kick the next vCPU in line awake.  If the
  lock is no longer in contention, it also clears the slowpath flag.

The "slowpath state" is stored in the LSB of the within the lock tail
ticket.  This has the effect of reducing the max number of CPUs by
half (so, a "small ticket" can deal with 128 CPUs, and "large ticket"
32768).

This series provides a Xen implementation, but it should be
straightforward to add a KVM implementation as well.

Looks like a good baseline on which to build the KVM implementation.  We
might need some handshake to prevent interference on the host side with
the PLE code.

-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function