[PATCH v2 0/7] barrier: introduce smp_cond_load_*_timewait()

Ankur Arora ankur.a.arora at oracle.com
Fri May 2 01:52:16 PDT 2025


Hi,

This series adds waited variants of the smp_cond_load() primitives:
smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait(), and smp_cond_load_acquire_timewait().

There are two known users for these interfaces:

 - poll_idle() [1]
 - resilient queued spinlocks [2]

For both of these cases we want to wait on a condition but also want
to terminate the wait based on a timeout.

Before describing how v2 implements these interfaces, let me recap the
problems in v1 (Catalin outlined most of these in [3]):

smp_cond_load_relaxed_spinwait(ptr, cond_expr, time_expr_ns, time_limit_ns)
took four arguments, with ptr and cond_expr doing the usual smp_cond_load()
things and time_expr_ns and time_limit_ns being used to decide the
terminating condition.

There were some problems in the timekeeping:

1. How often do we do the (relatively expensive) time-check?

   The choice made was once very 200 spin-wait iterations, with each
   iteration trying to idle the pipeline by executing cpu_relax().

   The choice of 200 was, of course, arbitrary and somewhat meaningless
   across architectures. On recent x86, cpu_relax()/PAUSE takes ~20-30
   cycles, but on (non-SMT) arm64 cpu_relax()/YIELD is effectively
   just a NOP.

   Even if each architecture had its own limit, this will also vary
   across microarchitectures.

2. On arm64, which can do better than just cpu_relax(), for instance,
   by waiting for a store on an address (WFE), the implementation
   exclusively used WFE, with the spin-wait only used as a fallback
   for when the event-stream was disabled.

   One problem with this was that the worst case timeout overshoot
   with WFE is ARCH_TIMER_EVT_STREAM_PERIOD_US (100us) and so there's
   a vast gulf between that and a potentially much smaller granularity
   with the spin-wait versions. In addition the interface provided
   no way for the caller to specify or limit the oveshoot.

Non-timekeeping issues:

3. The interface was useful for poll_idle() like users but was not
   usable if the caller needed to do any work. For instance,
   rqspinlock uses it thus:

     smp_cond_load_acquire_timewait(v, c, 0, 1)

   Here the time-check always evaluates to false and all of the logic
   (ex. deadlock checking) is folded into the conditional.


With that foundation, the new interface is:

   smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait(ptr, cond_expr, wait_policy,
					 time_expr, time_end)

The added parameter, wait_policy provides a mechanism for the caller
to apportion time spent spinning or, where supported, in a wait.
This is somewhat inspired from the queue_poll() mechanism used
with smp_cond_load() in arm-smmu-v3 [4].

It addresses (1) by deciding the time-check granularity based on a
time interval instead of spinning for a fixed number of iterations.

(2) is addressed by the wait_policy allowing for different slack
values. The implemented versions of wait_policy allow for a coarse
or a fine grained slack. A user defined wait_policy could choose
its own wait parameter. This would also address (3).


With that, patches 1-5, add the generic and arm64 logic:

  "asm-generic: barrier: add smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()",
  "asm-generic: barrier: add wait_policy handlers"

  "arm64: barrier: enable waiting in smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()"
  "arm64: barrier: add coarse wait for smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()"
  "arm64: barrier: add fine wait for smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()".

And, patch 6, adds the acquire variant:

  "asm-generic: barrier: add smp_cond_load_acquire_timewait()"

And, finally patch 7 lays out how this could be used for rqspinlock:

  "bpf: rqspinlock: add rqspinlock policy handler for arm64".

Any comments appreciated!

Ankur


[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241107190818.522639-3-ankur.a.arora@oracle.com/
[2] Uses the smp_cond_load_acquire_timewait() from v1
    https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arm64/include/asm/rqspinlock.h
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/Z8dRalfxYcJIcLGj@arm.com/
[4] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/iommu/arm/arm-smmu-v3/arm-smmu-v3.c#n223


Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>
Cc: Will Deacon <will at kernel.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz at infradead.org>
Cc: Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi <memxor at gmail.com>
Cc: Alexei Starovoitov <ast at kernel.org>
Cc: linux-arch at vger.kernel.org


Ankur Arora (7):
  asm-generic: barrier: add smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()
  asm-generic: barrier: add wait_policy handlers
  arm64: barrier: enable waiting in smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()
  arm64: barrier: add coarse wait for smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()
  arm64: barrier: add fine wait for smp_cond_load_relaxed_timewait()
  asm-generic: barrier: add smp_cond_load_acquire_timewait()
  bpf: rqspinlock: add rqspinlock policy handler for arm64

 arch/arm64/include/asm/barrier.h    |  82 +++++++++++++++
 arch/arm64/include/asm/rqspinlock.h |  96 ++++--------------
 include/asm-generic/barrier.h       | 150 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 3 files changed, 251 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-)

-- 
2.43.5




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