[PATCH v15 3/6] locking/qspinlock: Introduce CNA into the slow path of qspinlock

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Aug 04, 2023 at 09:33:48AM +0800, Guo Ren wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 7:57 PM Peter Zijlstra <peterz at infradead.org> wrote:

> > CNA should only show a benefit when there is strong inter-node
> > contention, and in that case it is typically best to fix the kernel side
> > locking.
> >
> > Hence the question as to what lock prompted you to look at this.
> I met the long lock queue situation when the hardware gave an overly
> aggressive store queue merge buffer delay mechanism. See:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-riscv/20230802164701.192791-8-guoren@kernel.org/

*groan*, so you're using it to work around 'broken' hardware :-(

Wouldn't that hardware have horrifically bad lock throughput anyway?
Everybody would end up waiting on that store buffer delay.

> This also let me consider improving the efficiency of the long lock
> queue release. For example, if the queue is like this:
> 
> (Node0 cpu0) -> (Node1 cpu64) -> (Node0 cpu1) -> (Node1 cpu65) ->
> (Node0 cpu2) -> (Node1 cpu66) -> ...
> 
> Then every mcs_unlock would cause a cross-NUMA transaction. But if we
> could make the queue like this:

See, this is where the ARM64 WFE would come in handy; I don't suppose
RISC-V has anything like that?

Also, by the time you have 6 waiters, I'd say the lock is terribly
contended and you should look at improving the lockinh scheme.