On Tue, 29 Oct 2013, Mel Gorman wrote:
> Thomas Gleixner and Peter Zijlstra discussed off-list that real-time users
> currently have a problem with the page lock being contended for unbounded
> periods of time during futex operations. The three of us discussed the
> possibiltity that the page lock is unnecessary in this case because we are
> not concerned with the usual races with reclaim and page cache updates. For
> anonymous pages, the associated futex object is the mm_struct which does
> not require the page lock. For inodes, we should be able to check under
> RCU read lock if the page mapping is still valid to take a reference to
> the inode. This just leaves one rare race that requires the page lock
> in the slow path. This patch does not completely eliminate the page lock
> but it should reduce contention in the majority of cases.
>
> Patch boots and futextest did not explode but I did no comparison
> performance tests. Thomas, do you have details of the workload that
> drove you to examine this problem? Alternatively, can you test it and
The scenario is simple. All you need is a PSHARED futex.
Task A
get_futex_key()
lock_page()
---> preemption
Now any other task trying to lock that page will have to wait until
task A gets scheduled back in, which is an unbound time.
It takes quite some time to reproduce, but I'll ask the people who
have that workload to give it a try.
Thanks,
tglx
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