locking/qrwlock: Prevent slowpath writers getting held up by fastpath

When a prospective writer takes the qrwlock locking slowpath due to the
lock being held, it attempts to cmpxchg the wmode field from 0 to
_QW_WAITING so that concurrent lockers also take the slowpath and queue
on the spinlock accordingly, allowing the lockers to drain.

Unfortunately, this isn't fair, because a fastpath writer that comes in
after the lock is made available but before the _QW_WAITING flag is set
can effectively jump the queue. If there is a steady stream of prospective
writers, then the waiter will be held off indefinitely.

This patch restores fairness by separating _QW_WAITING and _QW_LOCKED
into two distinct fields: _QW_LOCKED continues to occupy the bottom byte
of the lockword so that it can be cleared unconditionally when unlocking,
but _QW_WAITING now occupies what used to be the bottom bit of the reader
count. This then forces the slow-path for concurrent lockers.

Tested-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Jeremy Linton <jeremy.linton@arm.com>
Tested-by: Adam Wallis <awallis@codeaurora.org>
Tested-by: Jan Glauber <jglauber@cavium.com>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
Cc: Jeremy.Linton@arm.com
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1507810851-306-6-git-send-email-will.deacon@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/include/asm-generic/qrwlock_types.h b/include/asm-generic/qrwlock_types.h
index 507f2dc51bba..8af752acbdc0 100644
--- a/include/asm-generic/qrwlock_types.h
+++ b/include/asm-generic/qrwlock_types.h
@@ -13,11 +13,11 @@ typedef struct qrwlock {
 		atomic_t cnts;
 		struct {
 #ifdef __LITTLE_ENDIAN
-			u8 wmode;	/* Writer mode   */
-			u8 rcnts[3];	/* Reader counts */
+			u8 wlocked;	/* Locked for write? */
+			u8 __lstate[3];
 #else
-			u8 rcnts[3];	/* Reader counts */
-			u8 wmode;	/* Writer mode   */
+			u8 __lstate[3];
+			u8 wlocked;	/* Locked for write? */
 #endif
 		};
 	};