The RT specific R/W semaphore implementation used to restrict the number of
readers to one, because a writer cannot block on multiple readers and
inherit its priority or budget.
The single reader restricting was painful in various ways:
- Performance bottleneck for multi-threaded applications in the page fault
path (mmap sem)
- Progress blocker for drivers which are carefully crafted to avoid the
potential reader/writer deadlock in mainline.
The analysis of the writer code paths shows that properly written RT tasks
should not take them. Syscalls like mmap(), file access which take mmap sem
write locked have unbound latencies, which are completely unrelated to mmap
sem. Other R/W sem users like graphics drivers are not suitable for RT tasks
either.
So there is little risk to hurt RT tasks when the RT rwsem implementation is
done in the following way:
- Allow concurrent readers
- Make writers block until the last reader left the critical section. This
blocking is not subject to priority/budget inheritance.
- Readers blocked on a writer inherit their priority/budget in the normal
way.
There is a drawback with this scheme: R/W semaphores become writer unfair
though the applications which have triggered writer starvation (mostly on
mmap_sem) in the past are not really the typical workloads running on a RT
system. So while it's unlikely to hit writer starvation, it's possible. If
there are unexpected workloads on RT systems triggering it, the problem
has to be revisited.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210815211303.016885947@linutronix.de
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