• Sean Christopherson's avatar
    sched/core: Drop spinlocks on contention iff kernel is preemptible · c793a628
    Sean Christopherson authored
    Use preempt_model_preemptible() to detect a preemptible kernel when
    deciding whether or not to reschedule in order to drop a contended
    spinlock or rwlock.  Because PREEMPT_DYNAMIC selects PREEMPTION, kernels
    built with PREEMPT_DYNAMIC=y will yield contended locks even if the live
    preemption model is "none" or "voluntary".  In short, make kernels with
    dynamically selected models behave the same as kernels with statically
    selected models.
    
    Somewhat counter-intuitively, NOT yielding a lock can provide better
    latency for the relevant tasks/processes.  E.g. KVM x86's mmu_lock, a
    rwlock, is often contended between an invalidation event (takes mmu_lock
    for write) and a vCPU servicing a guest page fault (takes mmu_lock for
    read).  For _some_ setups, letting the invalidation task complete even
    if there is mmu_lock contention provides lower latency for *all* tasks,
    i.e. the invalidation completes sooner *and* the vCPU services the guest
    page fault sooner.
    
    But even KVM's mmu_lock behavior isn't uniform, e.g. the "best" behavior
    can vary depending on the host VMM, the guest workload, the number of
    vCPUs, the number of pCPUs in the host, why there is lock contention, etc.
    
    In other words, simply deleting the CONFIG_PREEMPTION guard (or doing the
    opposite and removing contention yielding entirely) needs to come with a
    big pile of data proving that changing the status quo is a net positive.
    
    Opportunistically document this side effect of preempt=full, as yielding
    contended spinlocks can have significant, user-visible impact.
    
    Fixes: c597bfdd ("sched: Provide Kconfig support for default dynamic preempt mode")
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarAnkur Arora <ankur.a.arora@oracle.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarChen Yu <yu.c.chen@intel.com>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/ef81ff36-64bb-4cfe-ae9b-e3acf47bff24@proxmox.com
    c793a628
kernel-parameters.txt 269 KB