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[Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH 00/14] PV ticket locks without expanding spinlock

To: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH 00/14] PV ticket locks without expanding spinlock
From: Avi Kivity <avi@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:56:29 +0200
Cc: Xen-devel <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@xxxxxxxxxx>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@xxxxxxxxx>, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>, Eric Dumazet <dada1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@xxxxxxxxxx>, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>, Américo Wang <xiyou.wangcong@xxxxxxxxx>, Linux Virtualization <virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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On 11/16/2010 11:08 PM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge<jeremy.fitzhardinge@xxxxxxxxxx>

Hi all,

This is a revised version of the pvticket lock series.

The early part of the series is mostly unchanged: it converts the bulk
of the ticket lock code into C and makes the "small" and "large"
ticket code common.  The only changes are the incorporation of various
review comments.

The latter part of the series converts from pv spinlocks to pv ticket
locks (ie, using the ticket lock fastpath as-is, but adding pv ops for
the ticketlock slowpaths).

The significant difference here is that rather than adding a new
ticket_t-sized element to arch_spinlock_t - effectively doubling the
size - I steal the LSB of the tickets themselves to store a bit.  This
allows the structure to remain the same size, but at the cost of
halving the max number of CPUs (127 for a 8-bit ticket, and a hard max
of 32767 overall).

The extra bit (well, two, but one is unused) in indicates whether the
lock has gone into "slowpath state", which means one of its lockers
has entered its slowpath and has blocked in the hypervisor.  This
means the current lock-holder needs to make sure it gets kicked out of
the hypervisor on unlock.

The spinlock remains in slowpath state until the last unlock happens
(ie there are no more queued lockers).

This code survives for a while with moderate testing, (make -j 100 on
8 VCPUs on a 4 PCPU system), but locks up after about 20 iterations,
so there's still some race/deadlock in there (probably something
misordered), but I think the basic approach is sound.

This is going to be very useful for kvm; I'd like to see the fixed version gets merged.

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


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