On Wed, 2016-08-10 at 11:44 -0700, Jason Low wrote: > Imre reported an issue where threads are getting starved when trying > to acquire a mutex. Threads acquiring a mutex can get arbitrarily delayed > sleeping on a mutex because other threads can continually steal the lock > in the fastpath and/or through optimistic spinning. > > Waiman has developed patches that allow waiters to return to optimistic > spinning, thus reducing the probability that starvation occurs. However, > Imre still sees this starvation problem in the workloads when optimistic > spinning is disabled. > > This patch adds an additional boolean to the mutex that gets used in > the CONFIG_SMP && !CONFIG_MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER cases. The flag signifies > whether or not other threads need to yield to a waiter and gets set > when a waiter spends too much time waiting for the mutex. The threshold > is currently set to 16 wakeups, and once the wakeup threshold is exceeded, > other threads must yield to the top waiter. The flag gets cleared > immediately after the top waiter acquires the mutex.
Just noticed that the patch title mentions "when spinning is enabled". The title should really be: "locking/mutex: Prevent lock starvation when spinning is disabled"
