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powerpc: Use lwarx hint in spinlocks

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Recent versions of the PowerPC architecture added a hint bit to the larx
instructions to differentiate between an atomic operation and a lock operation:

> 0 Other programs might attempt to modify the word in storage addressed by EA
> even if the subsequent Store Conditional succeeds.
>
> 1 Other programs will not attempt to modify the word in storage addressed by
> EA until the program that has acquired the lock performs a subsequent store
> releasing the lock.

To avoid a binutils dependency this patch create macros for the extended lwarx
format and uses it in the spinlock code. To test this change I used a simple
test case that acquires and releases a global pthread mutex:

	pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
	pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);

On a 32 core POWER6, running 32 test threads we spend almost all our time in
the futex spinlock code:

    94.37%     perf  [kernel]                     [k] ._raw_spin_lock
               |
               |--99.95%-- ._raw_spin_lock
               |          |
               |          |--63.29%-- .futex_wake
               |          |
               |          |--36.64%-- .futex_wait_setup

Which is a good test for this patch. The results (in lock/unlock operations per
second) are:

before: 1538203 ops/sec
after:  2189219 ops/sec

An improvement of 42%

A 32 core POWER7 improves even more:

before: 1279529 ops/sec
after:  2282076 ops/sec

An improvement of 78%

Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
This commit is contained in:
Anton Blanchard 2010-02-10 00:57:28 +00:00 • committed by Benjamin Herrenschmidt
commit 4e14a4d17a
2 changed files with 18 additions and 3 deletions
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