From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
"J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@citi.umich.edu>,
"Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>,
LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
Alexander Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>,
linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1
Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 10:08:18 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0805070956060.3024@woody.linux-foundation.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0805070948250.3024@woody.linux-foundation.org>
On Wed, 7 May 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Which, btw, is probably true. The BKL is normally held for short times,
> and released (by that thread) for relatively much longer times. Which
> is when spinlocks tend to work the best, even when they are fair (because
> it's not so much a fairness issue, it's simply a cost-of-taking-the-lock
> issue!)
.. and don't get me wrong: the old semaphores (and the new mutexes) should
also have this property when lucky: taking the lock is often a hot-path
case.
And the spinlock+generic semaphore thing probably makes that "lucky"
behavior be exponentially less likely, because now to hit the lucky case,
rather than the hot path having just *one* access to the interesting cache
line, it has basically something like 4 accesses (spinlock, count test,
count decrement, spinunlock), in addition to various serializing
instructions, so I suspect it quite often gets serialized simply because
even the "fast path" is actually about ten times as long!
As a result, a slow "fast path" means that the thing gets saturated much
more easily, and that in turn means that the "fast path" turns into a
"slow path" more easily, which is how you end up in the scheduler rather
than just taking the fast path.
This is why sleeping locks are more expensive in general: they have a
*huge* cost from when they get contended. Hundreds of times higher than a
spinlock. And the faster they are, the longer it takes for them to get
contended under load. So slowing them down in the fast path is a double
whammy, in that it shows their bad behaviour much earlier.
And the generic semaphores really are slower than the old optimized ones
in that fast path. By a *big* amount.
Which is why I'm 100% convinced it's not even worth saving the old code.
It needs to use mutexes, or spinlocks. I bet it has *nothing* to do with
"slow path" other than the fact that it gets to that slow path much more
these days.
Linus
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2008-05-07 17:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 140+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2008-05-06 5:48 AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1 Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-06 11:18 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 11:44 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-06 12:09 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 16:23 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 16:36 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-06 16:42 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 16:39 ` Alan Cox
2008-05-06 16:51 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 16:45 ` Alan Cox
2008-05-06 17:42 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-06 20:28 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-06 16:44 ` J. Bruce Fields
2008-05-06 17:21 ` Andrew Morton
2008-05-06 17:31 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 17:49 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-06 18:07 ` Andrew Morton
2008-05-11 11:11 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-06 17:39 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 6:49 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-06 17:45 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 16:38 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-07 16:55 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:08 ` Linus Torvalds [this message]
2008-05-07 17:16 ` Andrew Morton
2008-05-07 17:27 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:22 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 17:25 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 17:31 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:47 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:49 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 18:02 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 18:17 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 18:27 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 18:43 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 19:01 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 19:09 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 19:24 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-07 19:44 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 20:00 ` Oi. NFS people. Read this Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-07 22:10 ` Trond Myklebust
2008-05-09 1:43 ` J. Bruce Fields
2008-05-08 3:24 ` AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1 Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-08 3:34 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 4:37 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-08 14:58 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 2:11 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-07 3:41 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-07 3:59 ` Andrew Morton
2008-05-07 4:46 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-07 6:26 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 6:28 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 7:05 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-07 11:00 ` Andi Kleen
2008-05-07 11:46 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-07 12:21 ` Andi Kleen
2008-05-07 14:36 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 14:35 ` Alan Cox
2008-05-07 15:00 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 15:02 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 14:57 ` Andi Kleen
2008-05-07 15:31 ` Andrew Morton
2008-05-07 16:22 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-07 15:19 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:14 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 2:44 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-08 3:29 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 4:08 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-08 4:17 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 12:01 ` [patch] speed up / fix the new generic semaphore code (fix AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1) Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 12:28 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 14:43 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 15:10 ` [git pull] scheduler fixes Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 15:33 ` Adrian Bunk
2008-05-08 15:41 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 19:42 ` Adrian Bunk
2008-05-11 11:03 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 11:14 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 11:48 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 12:50 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 12:52 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 13:02 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 13:26 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 14:00 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 14:18 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 14:42 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 14:48 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 15:19 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 15:29 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-13 14:11 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-13 14:21 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-13 14:42 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-13 15:28 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-13 17:13 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-13 17:22 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-13 21:05 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 13:54 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 14:22 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 14:32 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 14:46 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 16:47 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-11 13:01 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 13:06 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-11 13:45 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-11 14:10 ` Sven Wegener
2008-05-08 16:02 ` [patch] speed up / fix the new generic semaphore code (fix AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1) Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 18:30 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 20:19 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 20:27 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 21:45 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 22:02 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 22:55 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 23:07 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 23:14 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 23:16 ` Alan Cox
2008-05-08 23:33 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-08 23:27 ` Alan Cox
2008-05-09 6:50 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-09 8:29 ` Andi Kleen
2008-05-08 13:20 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-08 15:01 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 13:56 ` Arjan van de Ven
2008-05-08 6:43 ` AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1 Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 6:48 ` Andrew Morton
2008-05-08 7:14 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-08 7:39 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 8:44 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-08 9:21 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 9:29 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-08 9:30 ` Zhang, Yanmin
2008-05-07 16:20 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 16:35 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:05 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 17:24 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:36 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 17:55 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 17:59 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-07 18:17 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-07 18:49 ` Ingo Molnar
2008-05-07 13:59 ` Alan Cox
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