Re: [RFC PATCH v7 1/7] Restartable sequences system call

From: Boqun Feng
Date: Wed Jul 27 2016 - 11:04:04 EST


Hi Mathieu,

On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 05:14:16PM -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> Expose a new system call allowing each thread to register one userspace
> memory area to be used as an ABI between kernel and user-space for two
> purposes: user-space restartable sequences and quick access to read the
> current CPU number value from user-space.
>
> * Restartable sequences (per-cpu atomics)
>
> The restartable critical sections (percpu atomics) work has been started
> by Paul Turner and Andrew Hunter. It lets the kernel handle restart of
> critical sections. [1] [2] The re-implementation proposed here brings a
> few simplifications to the ABI which facilitates porting to other

Agreed ;-)

> architectures and speeds up the user-space fast path. A locking-based
> fall-back, purely implemented in user-space, is proposed here to deal
> with debugger single-stepping. This fallback interacts with rseq_start()
> and rseq_finish(), which force retries in response to concurrent
> lock-based activity.
>

So I have enabled this on powerpc, thanks to your nice work to make
things easy for porting ;-)

A patchset will follow in-reply-to this email, which includes patches
enabling this on powerpc and a patch that improves the portability of
the selftests, which I think it's not necessary to be a standalone
patch, so it's OK to be merged into your patch #7.

I did some tests on 64bit little/big endian pSeries(guest) kernel with
selftest cases(64bit LE selftest on 64bit LE kernel, 64/32bit BE
selftest on 64bit BE kernel), things seemingly went well ;-)

Here are some benchmark results I got on a little endian guest with 64
VCPUs:

Benchmarking various approaches for reading the current CPU number:

Power8 PSeries Guest(64 VCPUs, the host has 16 cores, 128 hardware
threads):

- Baseline (empty loop): 1.56 ns
- Read CPU from rseq cpu_id: 1.56 ns
- Read CPU from rseq cpu_id (lazy register): 2.08 ns
- glibc 2.23-0ubuntu3 getcpu: 7.72 ns
- getcpu system call: 91.80 ns


Benchmarking various approaches for counter increment:

Power8 PSeries KVM Guest(64 VCPUs, the host has 16 cores, 128 hardware
threads):

Counter increment speed (ns/increment)
1 thread 2 threads 4 threads 8 threads 16 threads 32 threads
global increment (baseline) 6.5 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
percpu rseq increment 6.9 6.9 7.2 7.3 15.4 35.5
percpu rseq spinlock 19.0 18.9 19.4 19.4 35.5 71.8
global atomic increment 25.8 111.0 261.0 905.2 2319.5 4170.5 (__sync_add_and_fetch_4)
global atomic CAS 26.2 119.0 341.6 1183.0 3951.3 9312.5 (__sync_val_compare_and_swap_4)
global pthread mutex 40.0 238.1 644.0 2052.2 4272.5 8612.2


I surely need to run more tests for my patches in different
environments, and will try to adjust the patchset according to whatever
change you make(e.g. rseq_finish2) in the future.

(Add PPC maintainers in Cc)

Regards,
Boqun

> Here are benchmarks of counter increment in various scenarios compared
> to restartable sequences:
>
> ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
> Machine model: Cubietruck
>
> Counter increment speed (ns/increment)
> 1 thread 2 threads
> global increment (baseline) 6 N/A
> percpu rseq increment 50 52
> percpu rseq spinlock 94 94
> global atomic increment 48 74 (__sync_add_and_fetch_4)
> global atomic CAS 50 172 (__sync_val_compare_and_swap_4)
> global pthread mutex 148 862
>
> ARMv7 Processor rev 10 (v7l)
> Machine model: Wandboard
>
> Counter increment speed (ns/increment)
> 1 thread 4 threads
> global increment (baseline) 7 N/A
> percpu rseq increment 50 50
> percpu rseq spinlock 82 84
> global atomic increment 44 262 (__sync_add_and_fetch_4)
> global atomic CAS 46 316 (__sync_val_compare_and_swap_4)
> global pthread mutex 146 1400
>
> x86-64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz:
>
> Counter increment speed (ns/increment)
> 1 thread 8 threads
> global increment (baseline) 3.0 N/A
> percpu rseq increment 3.6 3.8
> percpu rseq spinlock 5.6 6.2
> global LOCK; inc 8.0 166.4
> global LOCK; cmpxchg 13.4 435.2
> global pthread mutex 25.2 1363.6
>
> * Reading the current CPU number
>
> Speeding up reading the current CPU number on which the caller thread is
> running is done by keeping the current CPU number up do date within the
> cpu_id field of the memory area registered by the thread. This is done
> by making scheduler migration set the TIF_NOTIFY_RESUME flag on the
> current thread. Upon return to user-space, a notify-resume handler
> updates the current CPU value within the registered user-space memory
> area. User-space can then read the current CPU number directly from
> memory.
>
> Keeping the current cpu id in a memory area shared between kernel and
> user-space is an improvement over current mechanisms available to read
> the current CPU number, which has the following benefits over
> alternative approaches:
>
> - 35x speedup on ARM vs system call through glibc
> - 20x speedup on x86 compared to calling glibc, which calls vdso
> executing a "lsl" instruction,
> - 14x speedup on x86 compared to inlined "lsl" instruction,
> - Unlike vdso approaches, this cpu_id value can be read from an inline
> assembly, which makes it a useful building block for restartable
> sequences.
> - The approach of reading the cpu id through memory mapping shared
> between kernel and user-space is portable (e.g. ARM), which is not the
> case for the lsl-based x86 vdso.
>
> On x86, yet another possible approach would be to use the gs segment
> selector to point to user-space per-cpu data. This approach performs
> similarly to the cpu id cache, but it has two disadvantages: it is
> not portable, and it is incompatible with existing applications already
> using the gs segment selector for other purposes.
>
> Benchmarking various approaches for reading the current CPU number:
>
> ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
> Machine model: Cubietruck
> - Baseline (empty loop): 8.4 ns
> - Read CPU from rseq cpu_id: 16.7 ns
> - Read CPU from rseq cpu_id (lazy register): 19.8 ns
> - glibc 2.19-0ubuntu6.6 getcpu: 301.8 ns
> - getcpu system call: 234.9 ns
>
> x86-64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz:
> - Baseline (empty loop): 0.8 ns
> - Read CPU from rseq cpu_id: 0.8 ns
> - Read CPU from rseq cpu_id (lazy register): 0.8 ns
> - Read using gs segment selector: 0.8 ns
> - "lsl" inline assembly: 13.0 ns
> - glibc 2.19-0ubuntu6 getcpu: 16.6 ns
> - getcpu system call: 53.9 ns
>
> - Speed
>
> Running 10 runs of hackbench -l 100000 seems to indicate, contrary to
> expectations, that enabling CONFIG_RSEQ slightly accelerates the
> scheduler:
>
> Configuration: 2 sockets * 8-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @
> 2.40GHz (directly on hardware, hyperthreading disabled in BIOS, energy
> saving disabled in BIOS, turboboost disabled in BIOS, cpuidle.off=1
> kernel parameter), with a Linux v4.6 defconfig+localyesconfig,
> restartable sequences series applied.
>

[snip]

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