Re: [PATCH] rwsem: add rwsem_is_contended

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On 09/01/2013 04:32 AM, Michel Lespinasse wrote:
Hi Josef,

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Josef Bacik <jbacik@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Btrfs uses an rwsem to control access to its extent tree.  Threads will hold a
read lock on this rwsem while they scan the extent tree, and if need_resched()
they will drop the lock and schedule.  The transaction commit needs to take a
write lock for this rwsem for a very short period to switch out the commit
roots.  If there are a lot of threads doing this caching operation we can starve
out the committers which slows everybody out.  To address this we want to add
this functionality to see if our rwsem has anybody waiting to take a write lock
so we can drop it and schedule for a bit to allow the commit to continue.
Thanks,

Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <jbacik@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

FYI, I once tried to introduce something like this before, but my use
case was pretty weak so it was not accepted at the time. I don't think
there were any objections to the API itself though, and I think it's
potentially a good idea if you use case justifies it.

Exactly, I'm concerned about the use case: readers can't starve writers.
Of course, lots of existing readers can temporarily prevent a writer from
acquiring, but those readers would already have the lock. Any new readers
wouldn't be able to prevent a waiting writer from obtaining the lock.

Josef,
Could you be more explicit, maybe with some detailed numbers about the
condition you report?

I say that because a subtle bug that could mistakenly wait a reader
existed in the rwsem implementation until relatively recently. Is there
some other lurking problem?

Two comments:

- Note that there are two rwsem implementations - if you are going to
add functionality to rwsem.h you want to add the same functionality in
rwsem-spinlock.h as well.

- I would prefer if you could avoid taking the wait_lock in your
rwsem.h implementation. In your use case (read lock is known to be
held), checking for sem->count < 0 would be sufficient to indicate a
writer is queued (or getting onto the queue). In the general case,
some architectures have the various values set up so that
RWSEM_WAITING_BIAS != RWSEM_ACTIVE_WRITE_BIAS - for these
architectures at least, you can check for waiters by looking if the
lowest bit of RWSEM_WAITING_BIAS is set in sem->count.

Michel,

I'm glad you point out a much better approach --- but why are we
considering open-coding down_read_trylock()/down_write_trylock?

Regards,
Peter Hurley

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