Userspace RCU 0.8.3 and 0.7.11
Sorry about the quick releases, but I though I should save our
packagers some time by releasing this fix, so they can skip over
yesterday's version. It fixes a higher-than-normal CPU usage in
presence of long RCU read-side critical sections. It does not affect
correctness of RCU, just the amount of CPU usage in very specific
scenarios. Since there is only one new commit, I'm putting the full
commit changelog (from the stable-0.8 branch) below.
Changelog:
commit e198fb6a2ebc22ceac8b10d953103b59452f24d4
Author: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Date: Sat Mar 1 11:33:25 2014 -0500
Fix: high cpu usage in synchronize_rcu with long RCU read-side C.S.
We noticed that with this kind of scenario:
- application using urcu-mb, urcu-membarrier, urcu-signal, or urcu-bp,
- long RCU read-side critical sections, caused by e.g. long network I/O
system calls,
- other short lived RCU critical sections running in other threads,
- very frequent invocation of call_rcu to enqueue callbacks,
lead to abnormally high CPU usage within synchronize_rcu() in the
call_rcu worker threads.
Inspection of the code gives us the answer: in urcu.c, we expect that if
we need to wait on a futex (wait_gp()), we expect to be able to end the
grace period within the next loop, having been notified by a
rcu_read_unlock(). However, this is not always the case: we can very
well be awakened by a rcu_read_unlock() executed on a thread running
short-lived RCU read-side critical sections, while the long-running RCU
read-side C.S. is still active. We end up in a situation where we
busy-wait for a very long time, because the counter is !=
RCU_QS_ACTIVE_ATTEMPTS until a 32-bit overflow happens (or more likely,
until we complete the grace period). We need to change the wait_loops ==
RCU_QS_ACTIVE_ATTEMPTS check into an inequality to use wait_gp() for
every attempts beyond RCU_QS_ACTIVE_ATTEMPTS loops.
urcu-bp.c also has this issue. Moreover, it uses usleep() rather than
poll() when dealing with long-running RCU read-side critical sections.
Turn the usleep 1000us (1ms) into a poll of 10ms. One of the advantage
of using poll() rather than usleep() is that it does not interact with
SIGALRM.
urcu-qsbr.c already checks for wait_loops >= RCU_QS_ACTIVE_ATTEMPTS, so
it is not affected by this issue.
Looking into these loops, however, shows that overflow of the loop
counter, although unlikely, would bring us back to a situation of high
cpu usage (a negative value well below RCU_QS_ACTIVE_ATTEMPTS).
Therefore, change the counter behavior so it stops incrementing when it
reaches RCU_QS_ACTIVE_ATTEMPTS, to eliminate overflow.
Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>