Re: [PATCH 2/2] locking/rwsem: Wake readers in a reader-owned rwsem if first waiter is a reader

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 12:16:09PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> In an analysis of a recent vmcore, a reader-owned rwsem was found with
> 385 readers but no writer in the wait queue. That is kind of unusual
> but it may be caused by some race conditions that we have not fully
> understood yet. In such a case, all the readers in the wait queue should
> join the other reader-owners and acquire the read lock.
> 
> In rwsem_down_write_slowpath(), an incoming writer will try to wake
> up the front readers under such circumstance. That is not the case for
> rwsem_down_read_slowpath(), modify the code to do this. This includes the
> original supported case where the wait queue is empty and the incoming
> reader is going to wake up itself.
> 
> With CONFIG_LOCK_EVENT_COUNTS enabled, the newly added rwsem_rlock_rwake
> event counter had 13 hits right after the bootup of a 2-socket system. So
> the condition that a reader-owned rwsem has readers at the front of
> the wait queue does happen pretty frequently. This patch will help to
> speed thing up in such cases.

Urgh.. this so reads like a band-aid.

Anyway; it appears to me the out_nolock case of down_read doesn't
feature a wakeup, can we create a scenario with that?

Anyway, I think I much prefer you sitting down writing the rules for
queueing and wakeup and then varifying them against the code rather than
adding extra wakeups just cause.