[PATCH] spin loop primitives for busy waiting

[Nicholas Piggin]

On Fri, 12 May 2017 12:58:12 +0000
David Laight <David.Laight at ACULAB.COM> wrote:

> From: Linus Torvalds
> > Sent: 11 May 2017 19:48  
> ...
> > The one question I have is about "spin_on_cond()": since you
> > explicitly document that the "no spinning" case is expected to be the
> > default, I really think that the default implementation should be
> > along the lines if
> > 
> >   #define spin_on_cond(cond) do { \
> >     if (unlikely(!(cond))) { \
> >         spin_begin(); do spin_cpu_relax(); while (!(cond)); spin_end(); \
> >     } \
> >   } while (0)
> > 
> > which will actually result in better code generation even if
> > spin_begin/end() are no-ops, and just generally optimizes for the
> > right behavior (ie do the spinning out-of-line, since by definition it
> > cannot be performance-critical after the first iteration).  
> 
> At least some versions of gcc convert while (cond) do {body}
> into if (cond) do {body} while (cond) even when 'cond'
> is a non-trivial expression and 'body' is trivial.
> The code-bloat is silly.
> No point enforcing the 'optimisation' here.

The point is for something like this:

static inline unsigned __read_seqcount_begin(const seqcount_t *s)
{
        unsigned ret;

repeat:
        ret = READ_ONCE(s->sequence);
        if (unlikely(ret & 1)) {
                cpu_relax();
                goto repeat;
        }
        return ret;
}

to be coded as:

static inline unsigned __read_seqcount_begin(const seqcount_t *s)
{
        unsigned ret;

	spin_on_cond( !((ret = READ_ONCE(s->sequence)) & 1) );

        return ret;
}

That's about as complex as you'd want to go with this, but I think
it's a reasonable case.

Now for x86, you would want these to fall out to the same code
generated. For powerpc, you do not want those spin_begin(); spin_end();

You are right there's a bit of code bloat there. It gets moved out
of line, but gcc still isn't all that smart about it though, and
it doesn't fold the tests back nicely if I go with Linus's suggestion,
so it doesn't work so well as generic implementation.

For powerpc we have to live with it I think.

Thanks,
Nick