Overhead of arm64 LSE per-CPU atomics?

[Willy Tarreau]

Hi!

On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 08:25:07PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > -----------------8<------------------------
> > > diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h
> > > index 9abcc8ef3087..e381034324e1 100644
> > > --- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h
> > > +++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h
> > > @@ -70,6 +70,7 @@ __percpu_##name##_case_##sz(void *ptr, unsigned long val)		\
> > >  	unsigned int loop;						\
> > >  	u##sz tmp;							\
> > >  									\
> > > +	asm volatile("prfm pstl1strm, %a0\n" : : "p" (ptr));
> > >  	asm volatile (ARM64_LSE_ATOMIC_INSN(				\
> > >  	/* LL/SC */							\
> > >  	"1:	ldxr" #sfx "\t%" #w "[tmp], %[ptr]\n"			\
> > > @@ -91,6 +92,7 @@ __percpu_##name##_return_case_##sz(void *ptr, unsigned long val)	\
> > >  	unsigned int loop;						\
> > >  	u##sz ret;							\
> > >  									\
> > > +	asm volatile("prfm pstl1strm, %a0\n" : : "p" (ptr));
> > >  	asm volatile (ARM64_LSE_ATOMIC_INSN(				\
> > >  	/* LL/SC */							\
> > >  	"1:	ldxr" #sfx "\t%" #w "[ret], %[ptr]\n"			\
> > > -----------------8<------------------------
> > 
> > I will give this a shot, thank you!
> 
> Jackpot!!!
> 
> This reduces the overhead to 8.427, which is significantly better than
> the non-LSE value of 9.853.  Still room for improvement, but much
> better than the 100ns values.

This is super interesting! I've blindly applied a similar change to all
of our atomics in haproxy and am seeing a consistent 2-7% perf increase
depending on the tests on a 80-core Ampere Altra (neoverse-n1). There
as well we're significantly using atomics to read/update mostly local
variables as we avoid sharing as much as possible. I'm pretty sure it
does hurt in certain cases, and we don't have this distinction of per_cpu
variants like here, however that makes me think about adding a "mostly
local" variant that we can choose from depending on the context. I'll
continue to experiment, thanks for sharing this trick (particularly to
Yicong Yang, the original reporter).

Willy