Re: [Problem] Cache line starvation

From: Kurt Kanzenbach
Date: Fri Sep 28 2018 - 05:05:29 EST


Hi Thomas,

On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 04:47:47PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Sep 2018, Kurt Kanzenbach wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 04:25:47PM +0200, Kurt Kanzenbach wrote:
> > > However, the issue still triggers fine. With stress-ng we're able to
> > > generate latency in millisecond range. The only workaround we've found
> > > so far is to add a "delay" in cpu_relax().
> >
> > It might interesting for you, how we added the delay. We've used:
> >
> > static inline void cpu_relax(void)
> > {
> > volatile int i = 0;
> >
> > asm volatile("yield" ::: "memory");
> > while (i++ <= 1000);
> > }
> >
> > Of course it's not efficient, but it works.
>
> I wonder if it's just the store on the stack which makes it work. I've seen
> that when instrumenting x86. When the careful instrumentation just stayed
> in registers it failed. Once it was too much and stack got involved it
> vanished away.

I've performed more tests: Adding a store to a global variable just
before calling cpu_relax() doesn't help. Furthermore, adding up to 20
yield instructions (just like you did on x86) didn't work either.

Thanks,
Kurt