tree bb67c4fc4f588a110c6277aba639cfe79430e54a
parent b575e837215325544b0dbcef912f13f369de4f3f
author Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> 1527943434 -0400
committer Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> 1528279111 +0200

rseq: Introduce restartable sequences system call

Expose a new system call allowing each thread to register one userspace
memory area to be used as an ABI between kernel and user-space for two
purposes: user-space restartable sequences and quick access to read the
current CPU number value from user-space.

* Restartable sequences (per-cpu atomics)

Restartables sequences allow user-space to perform update operations on
per-cpu data without requiring heavy-weight atomic operations.

The restartable critical sections (percpu atomics) work has been started
by Paul Turner and Andrew Hunter. It lets the kernel handle restart of
critical sections. [1] [2] The re-implementation proposed here brings a
few simplifications to the ABI which facilitates porting to other
architectures and speeds up the user-space fast path.

Here are benchmarks of various rseq use-cases.

Test hardware:

arm32: ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l) "Cubietruck", 2-core
x86-64: Intel E5-2630 v3@2.40GHz, 16-core, hyperthreading

The following benchmarks were all performed on a single thread.

* Per-CPU statistic counter increment

                getcpu+atomic (ns/op)    rseq (ns/op)    speedup
arm32:                344.0                 31.4          11.0
x86-64:                15.3                  2.0           7.7

* LTTng-UST: write event 32-bit header, 32-bit payload into tracer
             per-cpu buffer

                getcpu+atomic (ns/op)    rseq (ns/op)    speedup
arm32:               2502.0                 2250.0         1.1
x86-64:               117.4                   98.0         1.2

* liburcu percpu: lock-unlock pair, dereference, read/compare word

                getcpu+atomic (ns/op)    rseq (ns/op)    speedup
arm32:                751.0                 128.5          5.8
x86-64:                53.4                  28.6          1.9

* jemalloc memory allocator adapted to use rseq

Using rseq with per-cpu memory pools in jemalloc at Facebook (based on
rseq 2016 implementation):

The production workload response-time has 1-2% gain avg. latency, and
the P99 overall latency drops by 2-3%.

* Reading the current CPU number

Speeding up reading the current CPU number on which the caller thread is
running is done by keeping the current CPU number up do date within the
cpu_id field of the memory area registered by the thread. This is done
by making scheduler preemption set the TIF_NOTIFY_RESUME flag on the
current thread. Upon return to user-space, a notify-resume handler
updates the current CPU value within the registered user-space memory
area. User-space can then read the current CPU number directly from
memory.

Keeping the current cpu id in a memory area shared between kernel and
user-space is an improvement over current mechanisms available to read
the current CPU number, which has the following benefits over
alternative approaches:

- 35x speedup on ARM vs system call through glibc
- 20x speedup on x86 compared to calling glibc, which calls vdso
  executing a "lsl" instruction,
- 14x speedup on x86 compared to inlined "lsl" instruction,
- Unlike vdso approaches, this cpu_id value can be read from an inline
  assembly, which makes it a useful building block for restartable
  sequences.
- The approach of reading the cpu id through memory mapping shared
  between kernel and user-space is portable (e.g. ARM), which is not the
  case for the lsl-based x86 vdso.

On x86, yet another possible approach would be to use the gs segment
selector to point to user-space per-cpu data. This approach performs
similarly to the cpu id cache, but it has two disadvantages: it is
not portable, and it is incompatible with existing applications already
using the gs segment selector for other purposes.

Benchmarking various approaches for reading the current CPU number:

ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
Machine model: Cubietruck
- Baseline (empty loop):                                    8.4 ns
- Read CPU from rseq cpu_id:                               16.7 ns
- Read CPU from rseq cpu_id (lazy register):               19.8 ns
- glibc 2.19-0ubuntu6.6 getcpu:                           301.8 ns
- getcpu system call:                                     234.9 ns

x86-64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz:
- Baseline (empty loop):                                    0.8 ns
- Read CPU from rseq cpu_id:                                0.8 ns
- Read CPU from rseq cpu_id (lazy register):                0.8 ns
- Read using gs segment selector:                           0.8 ns
- "lsl" inline assembly:                                   13.0 ns
- glibc 2.19-0ubuntu6 getcpu:                              16.6 ns
- getcpu system call:                                      53.9 ns

- Speed (benchmark taken on v8 of patchset)

Running 10 runs of hackbench -l 100000 seems to indicate, contrary to
expectations, that enabling CONFIG_RSEQ slightly accelerates the
scheduler:

Configuration: 2 sockets * 8-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @
2.40GHz (directly on hardware, hyperthreading disabled in BIOS, energy
saving disabled in BIOS, turboboost disabled in BIOS, cpuidle.off=1
kernel parameter), with a Linux v4.6 defconfig+localyesconfig,
restartable sequences series applied.

* CONFIG_RSEQ=n

avg.:      41.37 s
std.dev.:   0.36 s

* CONFIG_RSEQ=y

avg.:      40.46 s
std.dev.:   0.33 s

- Size

On x86-64, between CONFIG_RSEQ=n/y, the text size increase of vmlinux is
567 bytes, and the data size increase of vmlinux is 5696 bytes.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/650333/
[2] http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2013/ocw/system/presentations/1695/original/LPC%20-%20PerCpu%20Atomics.pdf

Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Joel Fernandes <joelaf@google.com>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Dave Watson <davejwatson@fb.com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: "H . Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Chris Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Russell King <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Andrew Hunter <ahh@google.com>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: "Paul E . McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Ben Maurer <bmaurer@fb.com>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20151027235635.16059.11630.stgit@pjt-glaptop.roam.corp.google.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20150624222609.6116.86035.stgit@kitami.mtv.corp.google.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180602124408.8430-3-mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com