In an overcommitted guest where some vCPUs have to be halted to make
forward progress in other areas, it is highly likely that a vCPU later
in the spinlock queue will be spinning while the ones earlier in the
queue would have been halted. The spinning in the later vCPUs is then
just a waste of precious CPU cycles because they are not going to
get the lock soon as the earlier ones have to be woken up and take
their turn to get the lock.
This patch implements an adaptive spinning mechanism where the vCPU
will call pv_wait() if the previous vCPU is not running.
Linux kernel builds were run in KVM guest on an 8-socket, 4
cores/socket Westmere-EX system and a 4-socket, 8 cores/socket
Haswell-EX system. Both systems are configured to have 32 physical
CPUs. The kernel build times before and after the patch were:
Westmere Haswell
Patch 32 vCPUs 48 vCPUs 32 vCPUs 48 vCPUs
----- -------- -------- -------- --------
Before patch 3m02.3s 5m00.2s 1m43.7s 3m03.5s
After patch 3m03.0s 4m37.5s 1m43.0s 2m47.2s
For 32 vCPUs, this patch doesn't cause any noticeable change in
performance. For 48 vCPUs (over-committed), there is about 8%
performance improvement.
Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hpe.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Cc: Douglas Hatch <doug.hatch@hpe.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Scott J Norton <scott.norton@hpe.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1447114167-47185-8-git-send-email-Waiman.Long@hpe.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
cd0272fab7