We found that a process with 10 thousnads threads has been encountered
a regression problem from Linux-v4.14 to Linux-v5.4. It is a kind of
workload which will concurrently allocate lots of memory in different
threads sometimes. In this case, we will see the down_read_trylock()
with a high hotspot. Therefore, we suppose that rwsem has a regression
at least since Linux-v5.4. In order to easily debug this problem, we
write a simply benchmark to create the similar situation lile the
following.
```c++
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>
#include <sched.h>
#include <cstdio>
#include <cassert>
#include <thread>
#include <vector>
#include <chrono>
volatile int mutex;
void trigger(int cpu, char* ptr, std::size_t sz)
{
cpu_set_t set;
CPU_ZERO(&set);
CPU_SET(cpu, &set);
assert(pthread_setaffinity_np(pthread_self(), sizeof(set), &set) == 0);
while (mutex);
for (std::size_t i = 0; i < sz; i += 4096) {
*ptr = '\0';
ptr += 4096;
}
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
std::size_t sz = 100;
if (argc > 1)
sz = atoi(argv[1]);
auto nproc = std:🧵:hardware_concurrency();
std::vector<std::thread> thr;
sz <<= 30;
auto* ptr = mmap(nullptr, sz, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_ANON |
MAP_PRIVATE, -1, 0);
assert(ptr != MAP_FAILED);
char* cptr = static_cast<char*>(ptr);
auto run = sz / nproc;
run = (run >> 12) << 12;
mutex = 1;
for (auto i = 0U; i < nproc; ++i) {
thr.emplace_back(std::thread([i, cptr, run]() { trigger(i, cptr, run); }));
cptr += run;
}
rusage usage_start;
getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF, &usage_start);
auto start = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
mutex = 0;
for (auto& t : thr)
t.join();
rusage usage_end;
getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF, &usage_end);
auto end = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
timeval utime;
timeval stime;
timersub(&usage_end.ru_utime, &usage_start.ru_utime, &utime);
timersub(&usage_end.ru_stime, &usage_start.ru_stime, &stime);
printf("usr: %ld.%06ld\n", utime.tv_sec, utime.tv_usec);
printf("sys: %ld.%06ld\n", stime.tv_sec, stime.tv_usec);
printf("real: %lu\n",
std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(end -
start).count());
return 0;
}
```
The functionality of above program is simply which creates `nproc`
threads and each of them are trying to touch memory (trigger page
fault) on different CPU. Then we will see the similar profile by
`perf top`.
25.55% [kernel] [k] down_read_trylock
14.78% [kernel] [k] handle_mm_fault
13.45% [kernel] [k] up_read
8.61% [kernel] [k] clear_page_erms
3.89% [kernel] [k] __do_page_fault
The highest hot instruction, which accounts for about 92%, in
down_read_trylock() is cmpxchg like the following.
91.89 │ lock cmpxchg %rdx,(%rdi)
Sice the problem is found by migrating from Linux-v4.14 to Linux-v5.4,
so we easily found that the commit ddb20d1d3a ("locking/rwsem: Optimize
down_read_trylock()") caused the regression. The reason is that the
commit assumes the rwsem is not contended at all. But it is not always
true for mmap lock which could be contended with thousands threads.
So most threads almost need to run at least 2 times of "cmpxchg" to
acquire the lock. The overhead of atomic operation is higher than
non-atomic instructions, which caused the regression.
By using the above benchmark, the real executing time on a x86-64 system
before and after the patch were:
Before Patch After Patch
# of Threads real real reduced by
------------ ------ ------ ----------
1 65,373 65,206 ~0.0%
4 15,467 15,378 ~0.5%
40 6,214 5,528 ~11.0%
For the uncontended case, the new down_read_trylock() is the same as
before. For the contended cases, the new down_read_trylock() is faster
than before. The more contended, the more fast.
Signed-off-by: Muchun Song <songmuchun@bytedance.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20211118094455.9068-1-songmuchun@bytedance.com
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