[PATCH v2] perf bench: Add atomic operations benchmark

[PATCH v2] perf bench: Add atomic operations benchmark

[Changbin Du]

Add a new 'atomic' collection to perf bench for benchmarking
atomic read-modify-write operations with multi-threaded
contention testing. It provides two subcommands:

  - atomic cas: contended compare-and-swap operations
    (__atomic_compare_exchange_n)
  - atomic inc: contended fetch-add operations (__atomic_fetch_add)

Both support configurable thread count and iteration count to
measure atomic contention effects.

Why this benchmark is needed:
- Atomic read-modify-write operations are fundamental to lock-free
  algorithms and data structures. Understanding their performance
  characteristics under contention is critical for designing
  high-performance concurrent applications.
- The benchmark helps identify atomic operation latency and
  scalability issues across different thread counts, revealing
  contention patterns that are not visible in single-threaded tests.
- Useful for evaluating atomic implementation quality on different
  architectures and for regression testing after changes to atomic
  primitives or memory ordering.

Measurement methodology:
- Each thread starts a private timer (clock_gettime CLOCK_MONOTONIC)
  after synchronizing on a pthread_barrier, ensuring all threads
  begin simultaneously.
- Each thread performs a hot loop of the selected atomic operation
  (compare-and-swap or fetch-add) on a shared u64 counter,
  incrementing it from 0 to iterations.
- The shared counter is cache-line aligned (64 bytes) to isolate
  contention to the target cache line and avoid false sharing.
- The wall-clock time is measured as the max of all per-thread
  runtimes (the time for the slowest thread to finish).
- The first repeat is excluded from statistics as a warmup phase
  to avoid cache-cold effects.

Example usage:
$ perf bench atomic all
# Running atomic/cas benchmark...
  Threads: 2, iterations/thread: 100000000, repeats: 10 (warmup: 1)
  Avg wall-clock time: 3286.297 msec  (stddev 6.820 msec)
  Total ops: 200,000,000
  Throughput total: 60,858,769 ops/sec
  Per-thread times and throughput (last repeat):
    fastest:  3304.312 msec  (30263489 ops/sec)
    slowest:  3325.518 msec  (30070504 ops/sec)
    avg:      3314.915 msec  (30166688 ops/sec)

# Running atomic/inc benchmark...
  Threads: 2, iterations/thread: 100000000, repeats: 10 (warmup: 1)
  Avg wall-clock time: 2170.716 msec  (stddev 7.306 msec)
  Total ops: 200,000,000
  Throughput total: 92,135,503 ops/sec
  Per-thread times and throughput (last repeat):
    fastest:  2196.458 msec  (45527849 ops/sec)
    slowest:  2208.764 msec  (45274198 ops/sec)
    avg:      2202.611 msec  (45400669 ops/sec)

Output fields explained:
- Threads: number of contending threads
- iterations/thread: atomic operations each thread performs
- repeats: number of test runs (first is warmup)
- Avg wall-clock time: mean time for all threads to complete
- stddev: standard deviation across repeats
- Total ops: threads x iterations/thread
- Throughput total: aggregate ops/sec across all threads
- Per-thread times: fastest/slowest/avg thread completion time
- Per-thread throughput: per-thread ops/sec (shows scheduling imbalance)

Assisted-by: opencode:DeepSeek-V4-Pro
Signed-off-by: Changbin Du <changbin.du@gmail.com>
---
Changes since v1:
- Add an 'atomic inc' subcommand benchmarking contended fetch-add
  (__atomic_fetch_add), split the entry points into
  bench_atomic_cas() and bench_atomic_inc(), and document it.
- Hoist the plain load out of the compare-and-swap retry loop; the
  failed __atomic_compare_exchange_n already returns the current
  value via *expected, so the loop measures pure CAS throughput.
- Cast the seconds delta to u64 before multiplying by NSEC_PER_SEC
  to avoid 32-bit signed overflow in the runtime calculation.
---
 tools/perf/Documentation/perf-bench.txt |  32 +++
 tools/perf/bench/Build                  |   1 +
 tools/perf/bench/atomic.c               | 268 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
 tools/perf/bench/bench.h                |   2 +
 tools/perf/builtin-bench.c              |   9 +
 5 files changed, 312 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 tools/perf/bench/atomic.c

diff --git a/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-bench.txt b/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-bench.txt
index c5913cf59c98..871c3aa5fc43 100644
--- a/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-bench.txt
+++ b/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-bench.txt
@@ -58,6 +58,9 @@ SUBSYSTEM
 'numa'::
 	NUMA scheduling and MM benchmarks.
 
+'atomic'::
+	Atomic operation benchmarks.
+
 'futex'::
 	Futex stressing benchmarks.
 
@@ -283,6 +286,35 @@ SUITES FOR 'numa'
 *mem*::
 Suite for evaluating NUMA workloads.
 
+SUITES FOR 'atomic'
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+*cas*::
+Suite for evaluating compare-and-swap (CAS) atomic operations under
+multi-threaded contention.
+
+*inc*::
+Suite for evaluating atomic fetch-add (increment) operations under
+multi-threaded contention.
+
+Options of *cas* and *inc*
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+-t::
+--threads=::
+Number of threads contending for the shared counter (default: 2).
+
+-i::
+--iterations=::
+Number of iterations per thread (default: 100000000).
+
+The per-thread fastest/slowest/avg summary is only printed when
+running with more than one thread.
+
+Note that the cas benchmark counts successful compare-and-swap
+operations only; retries and the loads between them are additional
+atomic instructions not included in the ops/sec count, so cas and
+inc throughputs are not directly comparable at the instruction
+level.
+
 SUITES FOR 'futex'
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 *hash*::
diff --git a/tools/perf/bench/Build b/tools/perf/bench/Build
index 67b76fe20ba6..c64c52468d3d 100644
--- a/tools/perf/bench/Build
+++ b/tools/perf/bench/Build
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ perf-bench-y += sched-pipe.o
 perf-bench-y += sched-seccomp-notify.o
 perf-bench-y += syscall.o
 perf-bench-y += mem-functions.o
+perf-bench-y += atomic.o
 perf-bench-y += futex.o
 perf-bench-y += futex-hash.o
 perf-bench-y += futex-wake.o
diff --git a/tools/perf/bench/atomic.c b/tools/perf/bench/atomic.c
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..08497910b563
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tools/perf/bench/atomic.c
@@ -0,0 +1,268 @@
+// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+/*
+ * Copyright (C) 2026 Changbin Du
+ *
+ * Benchmarks for atomic read-modify-write operations.
+ *
+ * Measures throughput (ops/sec) of contended atomic operations on a
+ * single shared counter across multiple threads. Each thread performs
+ * a hot loop of the selected operation -- compare-and-swap (cas) or
+ * fetch-add (inc) -- competing with all other threads for the same
+ * cache line.
+ */
+#include "bench.h"
+#include <linux/compiler.h>
+#include "../util/debug.h"
+
+#ifndef HAVE_PTHREAD_BARRIER
+int bench_atomic_cas(int argc __maybe_unused, const char **argv __maybe_unused)
+{
+	pr_err("%s: pthread_barrier_t unavailable, disabling this test...\n", __func__);
+	return 0;
+}
+
+int bench_atomic_inc(int argc __maybe_unused, const char **argv __maybe_unused)
+{
+	pr_err("%s: pthread_barrier_t unavailable, disabling this test...\n", __func__);
+	return 0;
+}
+#else /* HAVE_PTHREAD_BARRIER */
+#include <stdlib.h>
+#include <stdio.h>
+#include <stdbool.h>
+#include <string.h>
+#include <pthread.h>
+#include <time.h>
+#include <inttypes.h>
+#include <err.h>
+#include <linux/types.h>
+#include <linux/time64.h>
+#include <subcmd/parse-options.h>
+#include "../util/stat.h"
+
+static unsigned int threads	= 2;
+static unsigned int iterations	= 100000000;
+
+static const struct option options[] = {
+	OPT_UINTEGER('t', "threads", &threads,
+		     "Number of threads contending for the counter"),
+	OPT_UINTEGER('i', "iterations", &iterations,
+		     "Number of iterations per thread"),
+	OPT_END()
+};
+
+static const char * const cas_usage[] = {
+	"perf bench atomic cas <options>",
+	NULL
+};
+
+static const char * const inc_usage[] = {
+	"perf bench atomic inc <options>",
+	NULL
+};
+
+enum atomic_op {
+	OP_CAS,
+	OP_INC,
+};
+
+static int bench_op = OP_CAS;
+
+static u64 shared_counter __aligned(64);
+static pthread_barrier_t start_barrier __aligned(64);
+
+struct worker_stats {
+	u64	runtime_ns;
+};
+
+static void *worker(void *arg)
+{
+	struct worker_stats *ws = (struct worker_stats *)arg;
+	struct timespec tstart, tend;
+	u64 i;
+
+	pthread_barrier_wait(&start_barrier);
+
+	clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &tstart);
+	switch (bench_op) {
+	case OP_CAS:
+		for (i = 0; i < iterations; i++) {
+			u64 old_val, new_val;
+
+			old_val = __atomic_load_n(&shared_counter, __ATOMIC_RELAXED);
+			do {
+				new_val = old_val + 1;
+			} while (!__atomic_compare_exchange_n(&shared_counter,
+							      &old_val, new_val,
+							      false,
+							      __ATOMIC_RELAXED,
+							      __ATOMIC_RELAXED));
+		}
+		break;
+	case OP_INC:
+		for (i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
+			__atomic_fetch_add(&shared_counter, 1, __ATOMIC_RELAXED);
+		break;
+	default:
+		break;
+	}
+	clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &tend);
+
+	ws->runtime_ns	= (u64)(tend.tv_sec - tstart.tv_sec) * NSEC_PER_SEC +
+			  (tend.tv_nsec - tstart.tv_nsec);
+
+	return NULL;
+}
+
+static void print_default_format(struct worker_stats *wstats,
+				 struct stats *time_stats)
+{
+	double time_avg, time_stddev;
+
+	printf("  Threads: %u, iterations/thread: %u, repeats: %u (warmup: 1)\n",
+	       threads, iterations, bench_repeat);
+
+	time_avg    = avg_stats(time_stats);
+	time_stddev = stddev_stats(time_stats);
+
+	printf("  Avg wall-clock time: %.3f msec  (stddev %.3f msec)\n",
+	       time_avg / (double)NSEC_PER_MSEC,
+	       time_stddev / (double)NSEC_PER_MSEC);
+	printf("  Total ops: %'" PRIu64 "\n",
+	       iterations * (u64)threads);
+	printf("  Throughput total: %'.0f ops/sec\n",
+	       (double)(iterations * (u64)threads) /
+	       (time_avg / (double)NSEC_PER_SEC));
+
+	/*
+	 * Per-thread statistics from the last measured repeat show
+	 * fairness / imbalance in CPU scheduling.
+	 */
+	if (threads > 1) {
+		u64 min_ns = UINT64_MAX, max_ns = 0, total_ns = 0;
+		double min_thru, max_thru, avg_thru;
+
+		for (unsigned int t = 0; t < threads; t++) {
+			if (wstats[t].runtime_ns < min_ns)
+				min_ns = wstats[t].runtime_ns;
+			if (wstats[t].runtime_ns > max_ns)
+				max_ns = wstats[t].runtime_ns;
+			total_ns += wstats[t].runtime_ns;
+		}
+
+		min_thru = (double)iterations * NSEC_PER_SEC / min_ns;
+		max_thru = (double)iterations * NSEC_PER_SEC / max_ns;
+		avg_thru = (double)threads * iterations * NSEC_PER_SEC / total_ns;
+
+		printf("  Per-thread times and throughput (last repeat):\n");
+		printf("    fastest:  %.3f msec  (%.0f ops/sec)\n",
+		       min_ns / (double)NSEC_PER_MSEC, min_thru);
+		printf("    slowest:  %.3f msec  (%.0f ops/sec)\n",
+		       max_ns / (double)NSEC_PER_MSEC, max_thru);
+		printf("    avg:      %.3f msec  (%.0f ops/sec)\n",
+		       (total_ns / threads) / (double)NSEC_PER_MSEC, avg_thru);
+	}
+}
+
+static int run_benchmark(void)
+{
+	pthread_t *thread_ids;
+	struct worker_stats *wstats;
+	struct stats time_stats;
+	unsigned int r, t;
+
+	thread_ids = calloc(threads, sizeof(pthread_t));
+	if (!thread_ids)
+		err(EXIT_FAILURE, "calloc");
+
+	wstats = calloc(threads, sizeof(struct worker_stats));
+	if (!wstats)
+		err(EXIT_FAILURE, "calloc");
+
+	init_stats(&time_stats);
+
+	for (r = 0; r < bench_repeat + 1; r++) {
+		u64 max_runtime_ns = 0;
+
+		shared_counter = 0;
+		pthread_barrier_init(&start_barrier, NULL, threads);
+
+		for (t = 0; t < threads; t++) {
+			if (pthread_create(&thread_ids[t], NULL,
+					   worker, &wstats[t]))
+				err(EXIT_FAILURE, "pthread_create");
+		}
+
+		for (t = 0; t < threads; t++)
+			pthread_join(thread_ids[t], NULL);
+
+		pthread_barrier_destroy(&start_barrier);
+
+		for (t = 0; t < threads; t++) {
+			if (wstats[t].runtime_ns > max_runtime_ns)
+				max_runtime_ns = wstats[t].runtime_ns;
+		}
+
+		/*
+		 * Exclude the first repeat (warmup) from statistics so
+		 * that cache-cold and lazy-init effects are not counted.
+		 */
+		if (r > 0)
+			update_stats(&time_stats, max_runtime_ns);
+	}
+
+	switch (bench_format) {
+	case BENCH_FORMAT_DEFAULT:
+		print_default_format(wstats, &time_stats);
+		break;
+
+	case BENCH_FORMAT_SIMPLE:
+		printf("%.0f\n",
+		       (double)(iterations * (u64)threads) /
+		       (avg_stats(&time_stats) / (double)NSEC_PER_SEC));
+		break;
+
+	default:
+		fprintf(stderr, "Unknown format: %d\n", bench_format);
+		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
+	}
+
+	free(thread_ids);
+	free(wstats);
+
+	return 0;
+}
+
+static int run_atomic_bench(int argc, const char **argv,
+			    const char * const *usage)
+{
+	if (parse_options(argc, argv, options, usage, 0)) {
+		usage_with_options(usage, options);
+		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
+	}
+
+	if (threads < 1) {
+		fprintf(stderr, "Invalid thread count: %u\n", threads);
+		return 1;
+	}
+
+	if (iterations < 1) {
+		fprintf(stderr, "Invalid iteration count: %u\n", iterations);
+		return 1;
+	}
+
+	return run_benchmark();
+}
+
+int bench_atomic_cas(int argc, const char **argv)
+{
+	bench_op = OP_CAS;
+	return run_atomic_bench(argc, argv, cas_usage);
+}
+
+int bench_atomic_inc(int argc, const char **argv)
+{
+	bench_op = OP_INC;
+	return run_atomic_bench(argc, argv, inc_usage);
+}
+#endif /* HAVE_PTHREAD_BARRIER */
diff --git a/tools/perf/bench/bench.h b/tools/perf/bench/bench.h
index 8519eb5a42fa..85e3ac471875 100644
--- a/tools/perf/bench/bench.h
+++ b/tools/perf/bench/bench.h
@@ -30,6 +30,8 @@ int bench_mem_memcpy(int argc, const char **argv);
 int bench_mem_memset(int argc, const char **argv);
 int bench_mem_mmap(int argc, const char **argv);
 int bench_mem_find_bit(int argc, const char **argv);
+int bench_atomic_cas(int argc, const char **argv);
+int bench_atomic_inc(int argc, const char **argv);
 int bench_futex_hash(int argc, const char **argv);
 int bench_futex_wake(int argc, const char **argv);
 int bench_futex_wake_parallel(int argc, const char **argv);
diff --git a/tools/perf/builtin-bench.c b/tools/perf/builtin-bench.c
index 02d47913cc6a..62bebdedd3b8 100644
--- a/tools/perf/builtin-bench.c
+++ b/tools/perf/builtin-bench.c
@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@
  *  syscall ... System call performance
  *  mem   ... memory access performance
  *  numa  ... NUMA scheduling and MM performance
+ *  atomic ... Atomic operation performance
  *  futex ... Futex performance
  *  epoll ... Event poll performance
  */
@@ -115,6 +116,13 @@ static const struct bench uprobe_benchmarks[] = {
 	{ NULL,	NULL, NULL },
 };
 
+static const struct bench atomic_benchmarks[] = {
+	{ "cas",	"Benchmark CAS (compare-and-swap) operations",	bench_atomic_cas	},
+	{ "inc",	"Benchmark atomic fetch-add operations",	bench_atomic_inc	},
+	{ "all",	"Run all atomic benchmarks",			NULL			},
+	{ NULL,		NULL,						NULL			}
+};
+
 struct collection {
 	const char		*name;
 	const char		*summary;
@@ -128,6 +136,7 @@ static const struct collection collections[] = {
 #ifdef HAVE_LIBNUMA_SUPPORT
 	{ "numa",	"NUMA scheduling and MM benchmarks",		numa_benchmarks		},
 #endif
+	{ "atomic",	"Atomic operation benchmarks",			atomic_benchmarks	},
 	{"futex",       "Futex stressing benchmarks",                   futex_benchmarks        },
 #ifdef HAVE_EVENTFD_SUPPORT
 	{"epoll",       "Epoll stressing benchmarks",                   epoll_benchmarks        },
-- 
2.53.0