locking/mutex: Add lock handoff to avoid starvation

Implement lock handoff to avoid lock starvation.

Lock starvation is possible because mutex_lock() allows lock stealing,
where a running (or optimistic spinning) task beats the woken waiter
to the acquire.

Lock stealing is an important performance optimization because waiting
for a waiter to wake up and get runtime can take a significant time,
during which everyboy would stall on the lock.

The down-side is of course that it allows for starvation.

This patch has the waiter requesting a handoff if it fails to acquire
the lock upon waking. This re-introduces some of the wait time,
because once we do a handoff we have to wait for the waiter to wake up
again.

A future patch will add a round of optimistic spinning to attempt to
alleviate this penalty, but if that turns out to not be enough, we can
add a counter and only request handoff after multiple failed wakeups.

There are a few tricky implementation details:

 - accepting a handoff must only be done in the wait-loop. Since the
   handoff condition is owner == current, it can easily cause
   recursive locking trouble.

 - accepting the handoff must be careful to provide the ACQUIRE
   semantics.

 - having the HANDOFF bit set on unlock requires care, we must not
   clear the owner.

 - we must be careful to not leave HANDOFF set after we've acquired
   the lock. The tricky scenario is setting the HANDOFF bit on an
   unlocked mutex.

Tested-by: Jason Low <jason.low2@hpe.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hpe.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions