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author 2019-12-09 09:48:27 -0800 committer 2020-02-08 11:39:19 -0800 commit 0ddad21d3e99c743a3aa473121dc5561679e26bb (patch) tree ddd1b61099a17e8afe0074f20130722f99090abf parent d5226fa6dbae0569ee43ecfc08bdcd6770fc4755 (diff) download linux-0ddad21d3e99c743a3aa473121dc5561679e26bb.tar.gz



pipe: use exclusive waits when reading or writing

This makes the pipe code use separate wait-queues and exclusive waiting for readers and writers, avoiding a nasty thundering herd problem when there are lots of readers waiting for data on a pipe (or, less commonly, lots of writers waiting for a pipe to have space). While this isn't a common occurrence in the traditional "use a pipe as a data transport" case, where you typically only have a single reader and a single writer process, there is one common special case: using a pipe as a source of "locking tokens" rather than for data communication. In particular, the GNU make jobserver code ends up using a pipe as a way to limit parallelism, where each job consumes a token by reading a byte from the jobserver pipe, and releases the token by writing a byte back to the pipe. This pattern is fairly traditional on Unix, and works very well, but will waste a lot of time waking up a lot of processes when only a single reader needs to be woken up when a writer releases a new token. A simplified test-case of just this pipe interaction is to create 64 processes, and then pass a single token around between them (this test-case also intentionally passes another token that gets ignored to test the "wake up next" logic too, in case anybody wonders about it): #include <unistd.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { int fd[2], counters[2]; pipe(fd); counters[0] = 0; counters[1] = -1; write(fd[1], counters, sizeof(counters)); /* 64 processes */ fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); do { int i; read(fd[0], &i, sizeof(i)); if (i < 0) continue; counters[0] = i+1; write(fd[1], counters, (1+(i & 1)) *sizeof(int)); } while (counters[0] < 1000000); return 0; } and in a perfect world, passing that token around should only cause one context switch per transfer, when the writer of a token causes a directed wakeup of just a single reader. But with the "writer wakes all readers" model we traditionally had, on my test box the above case causes more than an order of magnitude more scheduling: instead of the expected ~1M context switches, "perf stat" shows 231,852.37 msec task-clock # 15.857 CPUs utilized 11,250,961 context-switches # 0.049 M/sec 616,304 cpu-migrations # 0.003 M/sec 1,648 page-faults # 0.007 K/sec 1,097,903,998,514 cycles # 4.735 GHz 120,781,778,352 instructions # 0.11 insn per cycle 27,997,056,043 branches # 120.754 M/sec 283,581,233 branch-misses # 1.01% of all branches 14.621273891 seconds time elapsed 0.018243000 seconds user 3.611468000 seconds sys before this commit. After this commit, I get 5,229.55 msec task-clock # 3.072 CPUs utilized 1,212,233 context-switches # 0.232 M/sec 103,951 cpu-migrations # 0.020 M/sec 1,328 page-faults # 0.254 K/sec 21,307,456,166 cycles # 4.074 GHz 12,947,819,999 instructions # 0.61 insn per cycle 2,881,985,678 branches # 551.096 M/sec 64,267,015 branch-misses # 2.23% of all branches 1.702148350 seconds time elapsed 0.004868000 seconds user 0.110786000 seconds sys instead. Much better. [ Note! This kernel improvement seems to be very good at triggering a race condition in the make jobserver (in GNU make 4.2.1) for me. It's a long known bug that was fixed back in June 2017 by GNU make commit b552b0525198 ("[SV 51159] Use a non-blocking read with pselect to avoid hangs."). But there wasn't a new release of GNU make until 4.3 on Jan 19 2020, so a number of distributions may still have the buggy version. Some have backported the fix to their 4.2.1 release, though, and even without the fix it's quite timing-dependent whether the bug actually is hit. ] Josh Triplett says: "I've been hammering on your pipe fix patch (switching to exclusive wait queues) for a month or so, on several different systems, and I've run into no issues with it. The patch *substantially* improves parallel build times on large (~100 CPU) systems, both with parallel make and with other things that use make's pipe-based jobserver. All current distributions (including stable and long-term stable distributions) have versions of GNU make that no longer have the jobserver bug" Tested-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

4 files changed, 51 insertions, 30 deletions