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mutex: Place lock in contended state after fastpath_lock failure
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ARM recently moved to asm-generic/mutex-xchg.h for its mutex
implementation after the previous implementation was found to be missing
some crucial memory barriers. However, this has revealed some problems
running hackbench on SMP platforms due to the way in which the
MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER code operates.

The symptoms are that a bunch of hackbench tasks are left waiting on an
unlocked mutex and therefore never get woken up to claim it. This boils
down to the following sequence of events:

        Task A        Task B        Task C        Lock value
0                                                     1
1       lock()                                        0
2                     lock()                          0
3                     spin(A)                         0
4       unlock()                                      1
5                                   lock()            0
6                     cmpxchg(1,0)                    0
7                     contended()                    -1
8       lock()                                        0
9       spin(C)                                       0
10                                  unlock()          1
11      cmpxchg(1,0)                                  0
12      unlock()                                      1

At this point, the lock is unlocked, but Task B is in an uninterruptible
sleep with nobody to wake it up.

This patch fixes the problem by ensuring we put the lock into the
contended state if we fail to acquire it on the fastpath, ensuring that
any blocked waiters are woken up when the mutex is released.

Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@fusionio.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-6e9lrw2avczr0617fzl5vqb8@git.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
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Will Deacon authored and Thomas Gleixner committed Aug 13, 2012
1 parent 3bf671a commit 0bce9c4
Showing 1 changed file with 9 additions and 2 deletions.
11 changes: 9 additions & 2 deletions include/asm-generic/mutex-xchg.h
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -26,7 +26,13 @@ static inline void
__mutex_fastpath_lock(atomic_t *count, void (*fail_fn)(atomic_t *))
{
if (unlikely(atomic_xchg(count, 0) != 1))
fail_fn(count);
/*
* We failed to acquire the lock, so mark it contended
* to ensure that any waiting tasks are woken up by the
* unlock slow path.
*/
if (likely(atomic_xchg(count, -1) != 1))
fail_fn(count);
}

/**
Expand All @@ -43,7 +49,8 @@ static inline int
__mutex_fastpath_lock_retval(atomic_t *count, int (*fail_fn)(atomic_t *))
{
if (unlikely(atomic_xchg(count, 0) != 1))
return fail_fn(count);
if (likely(atomic_xchg(count, -1) != 1))
return fail_fn(count);
return 0;
}

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