Re: [thiscpuops upgrade 10/10] Lockless (and preemptless) fastpaths for slub

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

Le mardi 23 novembre 2010 à 17:51 -0600, Christoph Lameter a écrit :
> pièce jointe document texte brut (slub_generation)
> Use the this_cpu_cmpxchg_double functionality to implement a lockless
> allocation algorith.
> 
> Each of the per cpu pointers is paired with a transaction id that ensures
> that updates of the per cpu information can only occur in sequence on
> a certain cpu.
> 
> A transaction id is a "long" integer that is comprised of an event number
> and the cpu number. The event number is incremented for every change to the
> per cpu state. This means that the cmpxchg instruction can verify for an
> update that nothing interfered and that we are updating the percpu structure
> for the processor where we picked up the information and that we are also
> currently on that processor when we update the information.
> 
> This results in a significant decrease of the overhead in the fastpaths. It
> also makes it easy to adopt the fast path for realtime kernels since this
> is lockless and does not require that the use of the current per cpu area
> over the critical section. It is only important that the per cpu area is
> current at the beginning of the critical section and at that end.
> 
> So there is no need even to disable preemption which will make the allocations
> scale well in a RT environment.
> 
> [Beware: There have been previous attempts at lockless fastpaths that
> did not succeed. We hope to have learned from these experiences but
> review certainly is necessary.]
> 
> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
> Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
> 
> ---

>  
>  /*
> + * Calculate the next globally unique transaction for disambiguiation
> + * during cmpxchg. The transactions start with the cpu number and are then
> + * incremented by CONFIG_NR_CPUS.
> + */
> +static inline unsigned long next_tid(unsigned long tid)
> +{
> +	return tid + CONFIG_NR_CPUS;
> +}


Hmm, this only works for power of two NR_CPUS, or else one cpu 'tid'
could wrap on another cpu tid.

I suggest using 4096  (or roundup_pow_of_two(CONFIG_NR_CPUS))