cvs commit: src/lib/libthr/thread thr_pspinlock.c
David Xu
davidxu at FreeBSD.org
Wed Oct 17 01:50:44 PDT 2007
Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Jason Evans wrote:
>
>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>
>>> David Xu wrote:
>>>
>>>> FreeBSD src repository
>>>>
>>>> Modified files:
>>>> lib/libthr/thread thr_pspinlock.c Log:
>>>> Reverse the logic of UP and SMP.
>>>> Submitted by: jasone
>>>> Revision Changes Path
>>>> 1.6 +1 -1 src/lib/libthr/thread/thr_pspinlock.c
>>>
>>>
>>> Are there any common applications that use this?
>>
>>
>> It's worth mentioning that this change, although correct, does not
>> make a measurable performance difference for the tests I was running
>> when I found the bug. It is possible that making the spinlocks
>> adaptive would help, but I didn't look into this.
>>
>> (I was working on malloc performance enhancements that have turned out
>> very nicely, but in the end I had to switch to hand-rolled "spin"
>> mutexes that eventually convert to blocking, in order to avoid the
>> possibility of unrecoverable priority inversion.)
>
>
> BTW I am looking at adding a non-portable (sort of) pthread mutex type
> that spins for a while when the lock is held, before blocking. This is
> sometimes good for performance when the pthread mutex is highly
> contended but held for short periods of time, and in fact Linux has such
> a mutex that is used by mysql with performance benefits.
>
> The real fix would be to make them adaptive in the same way as kernel
> mutexes (spin as long as the lock holder is running), but there is
> currently no easy way for userland to peer into the kernel to check the
> other thread's state.
>
> Kris
>
I have a patch to adaptively spin in userland, kernel is not involved.
http://people.freebsd.org/~davidxu/patch/libthr_spin.patch
I have not seen visible performance improvement in some tests,
unlike kernel code, many user application code do not care parallel
performance, they only care exclusive accessing to a resource, you can
call them badly written code, so spinning is not always useful.
However, with this patch, Sun's mutex ping-pong program's performance
is massively improved, try it.
Regards,
David Xu
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