sched, timer: Replace spinlocks with atomics in thread_group_cputimer(), to improve scalability

While running a database workload, we found a scalability issue with itimers.

Much of the problem was caused by the thread_group_cputimer spinlock.
Each time we account for group system/user time, we need to obtain a
thread_group_cputimer's spinlock to update the timers. On larger systems
(such as a 16 socket machine), this caused more than 30% of total time
spent trying to obtain this kernel lock to update these group timer stats.

This patch converts the timers to 64-bit atomic variables and use
atomic add to update them without a lock. With this patch, the percent
of total time spent updating thread group cputimer timers was reduced
from 30% down to less than 1%.

Note: On 32-bit systems using the generic 64-bit atomics, this causes
sample_group_cputimer() to take locks 3 times instead of just 1 time.
However, we tested this patch on a 32-bit system ARM system using the
generic atomics and did not find the overhead to be much of an issue.
An explanation for why this isn't an issue is that 32-bit systems usually
have small numbers of CPUs, and cacheline contention from extra spinlocks
called periodically is not really apparent on smaller systems.

Signed-off-by: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <aswin@hp.com>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <umgwanakikbuti@gmail.com>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Preeti U Murthy <preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Scott J Norton <scott.norton@hp.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hp.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1430251224-5764-4-git-send-email-jason.low2@hp.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sched.h b/include/linux/sched.h
index d70910355b20..a45874c3fab6 100644
--- a/include/linux/sched.h
+++ b/include/linux/sched.h
@@ -598,9 +598,10 @@ struct task_cputime {
  * used for thread group CPU timer calculations.
  */
 struct thread_group_cputimer {
-	struct task_cputime cputime;
+	atomic64_t utime;
+	atomic64_t stime;
+	atomic64_t sum_exec_runtime;
 	int running;
-	raw_spinlock_t lock;
 };
 
 #include <linux/rwsem.h>
@@ -2967,11 +2968,6 @@ static __always_inline bool need_resched(void)
 void thread_group_cputime(struct task_struct *tsk, struct task_cputime *times);
 void thread_group_cputimer(struct task_struct *tsk, struct task_cputime *times);
 
-static inline void thread_group_cputime_init(struct signal_struct *sig)
-{
-	raw_spin_lock_init(&sig->cputimer.lock);
-}
-
 /*
  * Reevaluate whether the task has signals pending delivery.
  * Wake the task if so.