mutex: implement adaptive spinning

Change mutex contention behaviour such that it will sometimes busy wait on
acquisition - moving its behaviour closer to that of spinlocks.

This concept got ported to mainline from the -rt tree, where it was originally
implemented for rtmutexes by Steven Rostedt, based on work by Gregory Haskins.

Testing with Ingo's test-mutex application (http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/50)
gave a 345% boost for VFS scalability on my testbox:

 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
 avg ops/sec:               296604

 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
 avg ops/sec:               85870

The key criteria for the busy wait is that the lock owner has to be running on
a (different) cpu. The idea is that as long as the owner is running, there is a
fair chance it'll release the lock soon, and thus we'll be better off spinning
instead of blocking/scheduling.

Since regular mutexes (as opposed to rtmutexes) do not atomically track the
owner, we add the owner in a non-atomic fashion and deal with the races in
the slowpath.

Furthermore, to ease the testing of the performance impact of this new code,
there is means to disable this behaviour runtime (without having to reboot
the system), when scheduler debugging is enabled (CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y),
by issuing the following command:

 # echo NO_OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features

This command re-enables spinning again (this is also the default):

 # echo OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/mutex.h b/kernel/mutex.h
index a075dafbb290..67578ca48f94 100644
--- a/kernel/mutex.h
+++ b/kernel/mutex.h
@@ -16,8 +16,26 @@
 #define mutex_remove_waiter(lock, waiter, ti) \
                 __list_del((waiter)->list.prev, (waiter)->list.next)
 
-#define debug_mutex_set_owner(lock, new_owner)          do { } while (0)
-#define debug_mutex_clear_owner(lock)                   do { } while (0)
+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+static inline void mutex_set_owner(struct mutex *lock)
+{
+        lock->owner = current_thread_info();
+}
+
+static inline void mutex_clear_owner(struct mutex *lock)
+{
+        lock->owner = NULL;
+}
+#else
+static inline void mutex_set_owner(struct mutex *lock)
+{
+}
+
+static inline void mutex_clear_owner(struct mutex *lock)
+{
+}
+#endif
+
 #define debug_mutex_wake_waiter(lock, waiter)           do { } while (0)
 #define debug_mutex_free_waiter(waiter)                 do { } while (0)
 #define debug_mutex_add_waiter(lock, waiter, ti)        do { } while (0)