futexes: Increase hash table size for better performance

Currently, the futex global hash table suffers from its fixed,
smallish (for today's standards) size of 256 entries, as well as
its lack of NUMA awareness. Large systems, using many futexes,
can be prone to high amounts of collisions; where these futexes
hash to the same bucket and lead to extra contention on the same
hb->lock. Furthermore, cacheline bouncing is a reality when we
have multiple hb->locks residing on the same cacheline and
different futexes hash to adjacent buckets.

This patch keeps the current static size of 16 entries for small
systems, or otherwise, 256 * ncpus (or larger as we need to
round the number to a power of 2). Note that this number of CPUs
accounts for all CPUs that can ever be available in the system,
taking into consideration things like hotpluging. While we do
impose extra overhead at bootup by making the hash table larger,
this is a one time thing, and does not shadow the benefits of
this patch.

Furthermore, as suggested by tglx, by cache aligning the hash
buckets we can avoid access across cacheline boundaries and also
avoid massive cache line bouncing if multiple cpus are hammering
away at different hash buckets which happen to reside in the
same cache line.

Also, similar to other core kernel components (pid, dcache,
tcp), by using alloc_large_system_hash() we benefit from its
NUMA awareness and thus the table is distributed among the nodes
instead of in a single one.

For a custom microbenchmark that pounds on the uaddr hashing --
making the wait path fail at futex_wait_setup() returning
-EWOULDBLOCK for large amounts of futexes, we can see the
following benefits on a 80-core, 8-socket 1Tb server:

 +---------+--------------------+------------------------+-----------------------+-------------------------------+
 | threads | baseline (ops/sec) | aligned-only (ops/sec) | large table (ops/sec) | large table+aligned (ops/sec) |
 +---------+--------------------+------------------------+-----------------------+-------------------------------+
 |     512 |              32426 | 50531  (+55.8%)        | 255274  (+687.2%)     | 292553  (+802.2%)             |
 |     256 |              65360 | 99588  (+52.3%)        | 443563  (+578.6%)     | 508088  (+677.3%)             |
 |     128 |             125635 | 200075 (+59.2%)        | 742613  (+491.1%)     | 835452  (+564.9%)             |
 |      80 |             193559 | 323425 (+67.1%)        | 1028147 (+431.1%)     | 1130304 (+483.9%)             |
 |      64 |             247667 | 443740 (+79.1%)        | 997300  (+302.6%)     | 1145494 (+362.5%)             |
 |      32 |             628412 | 721401 (+14.7%)        | 965996  (+53.7%)      | 1122115 (+78.5%)              |
 +---------+--------------------+------------------------+-----------------------+-------------------------------+

Reviewed-by: Darren Hart <dvhart@linux.intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hp.com>
Reviewed-and-tested-by: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Scott Norton <scott.norton@hp.com>
Cc: Tom Vaden <tom.vaden@hp.com>
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <aswin@hp.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1389569486-25487-3-git-send-email-davidlohr@hp.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
1 file changed