Ticket spinlocks have absolutely ghastly worst-case performance
characteristics in a virtual environment. If there is any contention
for physical CPUs (ie, there are more runnable vcpus than cpus), then
ticket locks can cause the system to end up spending 90+% of its time
spinning.
The problem is that (v)cpus waiting on a ticket spinlock will be
granted access to the lock in strict order they got their tickets. If
the hypervisor scheduler doesn't give the vcpus time in that order,
they will burn timeslices waiting for the scheduler to give the right
vcpu some time. In the worst case it could take O(n^2) vcpu scheduler
timeslices for everyone waiting on the lock to get it, not counting
new cpus trying to take the lock while the log-jam is sorted out.
These hooks allow a paravirt backend to replace the spinlock
implementation.
At the very least, this could revert the implementation back to the
old lock algorithm, which allows the next scheduled vcpu to take the
lock, and has basically fairly good performance.
It also allows the spinlocks to take advantages of the hypervisor
features to make locks more efficient (spin and block, for example).
The cost to native execution is an extra direct call when using a
spinlock function. There's no overhead if CONFIG_PARAVIRT is turned
off.
The lock structure is fixed at a single "unsigned int", initialized to
zero, but the spinlock implementation can use it as it wishes.
Thanks to Thomas Friebel's Xen Summit talk "Preventing Guests from
Spinning Around" for pointing out this problem.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Petr Tesarik <ptesarik@suse.cz>
Cc: Virtualization <virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Xen devel <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
Cc: Thomas Friebel <thomas.friebel@amd.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
74d4affde8