Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v6 05/11] pvqspinlock, x86: Allow unfair spinlock in a PV guest

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 02:16:06PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 13/03/2014 11:54, David Vrabel ha scritto:
> >On 12/03/14 18:54, Waiman Long wrote:
> >>Locking is always an issue in a virtualized environment as the virtual
> >>CPU that is waiting on a lock may get scheduled out and hence block
> >>any progress in lock acquisition even when the lock has been freed.
> >>
> >>One solution to this problem is to allow unfair lock in a
> >>para-virtualized environment. In this case, a new lock acquirer can
> >>come and steal the lock if the next-in-line CPU to get the lock is
> >>scheduled out. Unfair lock in a native environment is generally not a
> >>good idea as there is a possibility of lock starvation for a heavily
> >>contended lock.
> >
> >I do not think this is a good idea -- the problems with unfair locks are
> >worse in a virtualized guest.  If a waiting VCPU deschedules and has to
> >be kicked to grab a lock then it is very likely to lose a race with
> >another running VCPU trying to take a lock (since it takes time for the
> >VCPU to be rescheduled).
> 
> Actually, I think the unfair version should be automatically
> selected if running on a hypervisor.  Per-hypervisor pvops can
> choose to enable the fair one.
> 
> Lock unfairness may be particularly evident on a virtualized guest
> when the host is overcommitted, but problems with fair locks are
> even worse.
> 
> In fact, RHEL/CentOS 6 already uses unfair locks if
> X86_FEATURE_HYPERVISOR is set.  The patch was rejected upstream in
> favor of pv ticketlocks, but pv ticketlocks do not cover all
> hypervisors so perhaps we could revisit that choice.
> 
> Measurements were done by Gleb for two guests running 2.6.32 with 16
> vcpus each, on a 16-core system.  One guest ran with unfair locks,
> one guest ran with fair locks.  Two kernel compilations ("time make

And when you say fair locks are you saying PV ticketlocks or generic
ticketlocks? 
> -j 16 all") were started at the same time on both guests, and times
> were as follows:
> 
>     unfair:                         fair:
>     real 13m34.674s                 real 19m35.827s
>     user 96m2.638s                  user 102m38.665s
>     sys 56m14.991s                  sys 158m22.470s
> 
>     real 13m3.768s                  real 19m4.375s
>     user 95m34.509s                 user 111m9.903s
>     sys 53m40.550s                  sys 141m59.370s
> 
> Actually, interpreting the numbers shows an even worse slowdown.
> 
> Compilation took ~6.5 minutes in a guest when the host was not
> overcommitted, and with unfair locks everything scaled just fine.

You should see the same values with the PV ticketlock. It is not clear
to me if this testing did include that variant of locks?

> 
> Ticketlocks fell completely apart; during the first 13 minutes they
> were allotted 16*6.5=104 minutes of CPU time, and they spent almost
> all of it spinning in the kernel (102 minutes in the first run).

Right, the non-PV variant of them do fall apart. That is why
PV ticketlocks are so nice.

> They did perhaps 30 seconds worth of work because, as soon as the
> unfair-lock guest finished and the host was no longer overcommitted,
> compilation finished in 6 minutes.
> 
> So that's approximately 12x slowdown from using non-pv fair locks
> (vs. unfair locks) on a 200%-overcommitted host.

Ah, so it was non-PV.

I am curious if the test was any different if you tested PV ticketlocks
vs Red Hat variant of unfair locks.

> 
> Paolo
> 
> >>With the unfair locking activated on bare metal 4-socket Westmere-EX
> >>box, the execution times (in ms) of a spinlock micro-benchmark were
> >>as follows:
> >>
> >>  # of    Ticket       Fair     Unfair
> >>  tasks    lock     queue lock    queue lock
> >>  ------  -------   ----------    ----------
> >>    1       135        135       137
> >>    2      1045       1120       747
> >>    3      1827       2345              1084
> >>    4      2689       2934      1438
> >>    5      3736       3658      1722
> >>    6      4942       4434      2092
> >>    7      6304       5176          2245
> >>    8      7736       5955          2388
> >
> >Are these figures with or without the later PV support patches?
> 
> 

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