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Synchronization primitives in the Linux kernel. Part 2.
Queued Spinlocks
This is the second part of the chapter which describes synchronization primitives in the Linux kernel and in the first part of this chapter we met the first - spinlock. We will continue to learn this synchronization primitive in this part. If you have read the previous part, you may remember that besides normal spinlocks, the Linux kernel provides special type of spinlocks - queued spinlocks. In this part we will try to understand what does this concept represent.
We saw API of spinlock in the previous part:
spin_lock_init- produces initialization of the givenspinlock;spin_lock- acquires givenspinlock;spin_lock_bh- disables software interrupts and acquire givenspinlock.spin_lock_irqsaveandspin_lock_irq- disable interrupts on local processor and preserve/not preserve previous interrupt state in theflags;spin_unlock- releases givenspinlock;spin_unlock_bh- releases givenspinlockand enables software interrupts;spin_is_locked- returns the state of the givenspinlock;- and etc.
And we know that all of these macro which are defined in the include/linux/spinlock.h header file will be expanded to the call of the functions with arch_spin_.* prefix from the arch/x86/include/asm/spinlock.h for the x86_64 architecture. If we will look at this header fill with attention, we will that these functions (arch_spin_is_locked, arch_spin_lock, arch_spin_unlock and etc) defined only if the CONFIG_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS kernel configuration option is disabled:
#ifdef CONFIG_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS
#include <asm/qspinlock.h>
#else
static __always_inline void arch_spin_lock(arch_spinlock_t *lock)
{
...
...
...
}
...
...
...
#endif
This means that the arch/x86/include/asm/qspinlock.h header file provides own implementation of these functions. Actually they are macros and they are located in other header file. This header file is - include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h. If we will look into this header file, we will find definition of these macros:
#define arch_spin_is_locked(l) queued_spin_is_locked(l)
#define arch_spin_is_contended(l) queued_spin_is_contended(l)
#define arch_spin_value_unlocked(l) queued_spin_value_unlocked(l)
#define arch_spin_lock(l) queued_spin_lock(l)
#define arch_spin_trylock(l) queued_spin_trylock(l)
#define arch_spin_unlock(l) queued_spin_unlock(l)
#define arch_spin_lock_flags(l, f) queued_spin_lock(l)
#define arch_spin_unlock_wait(l) queued_spin_unlock_wait(l)
Before we will consider how queued spinlocks and their API are implemented, we take a look on theoretical part at first.
Introduction to queued spinlocks
Queued spinlocks is a locking mechanism in the Linux kernel which is replacement for the standard spinlocks. At least this is true for the x86_64 architecture. If we will look at the following kernel configuration file - kernel/Kconfig.locks, we will see following configuration entries:
config ARCH_USE_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS
bool
config QUEUED_SPINLOCKS
def_bool y if ARCH_USE_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS
depends on SMP
This means that the CONFIG_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS kernel configuration option will be enabled by default if the ARCH_USE_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS is enabled. We may see that the ARCH_USE_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS is enabled by default in the x86_64 specific kernel configuration file - arch/x86/Kconfig:
config X86
...
...
...
select ARCH_USE_QUEUED_SPINLOCKS
...
...
...
Before we will start to consider what is it queued spinlock concept, let's look on other types of spinlocks. For the start let's consider how normal spinlocks is implemented. Usually, implementation of normal spinlock is based on the test and set instruction. Principle of work of this instruction is pretty simple. This instruction writes a value to the memory location and returns old value from this memory location. Both of these operations are in atomic context i.e. this instruction is non-interruptible. So if the first thread started to execute this instruction, second thread will wait until the first processor will not finish. Basic lock can be built on top of this mechanism. Schematically it may look like this:
int lock(lock)
{
while (test_and_set(lock) == 1)
;
return 0;
}
int unlock(lock)
{
lock=0;
return lock;
}
The first thread will execute the test_and_set which will set the lock to 1. When the second thread will call the lock function, it will spin in the while loop, until the first thread will not call the unlock function and the lock will be equal to 0. This implementation is not very good for performance, because it has at least two problems. The first problem is that this implementation may be unfair and the thread from one processor may have long waiting time, even if it called the lock before other threads which are waiting for free lock too. The second problem is that all threads which want to acquire a lock, must to execute many atomic operations like test_and_set on a variable which is in shared memory. This leads to the cache invalidation as the cache of the processor will store lock=1, but the value of the lock in memory may be 1 after a thread will release this lock.
In the previous part we saw the second type of spinlock implementation - ticket spinlock. This approach solves the first problem and may guarantee order of threads which want to acquire a lock, but still has a second problem.
The topic of this part is queued spinlocks. This approach may help to solve both of these problems. The queued spinlocks allows to each processor to use its own memory location to spin. The basic principle of a queue-based spinlock can best be understood by studying a classic queue-based spinlock implementation called the MCS lock. Before we will look at implementation of the queued spinlocks in the Linux kernel, we will try to understand what is it MCS lock.
The basic idea of the MCS lock is in that as I already wrote in the previous paragraph, a thread spins on a local variable and each processor in the system has its own copy of these variable. In other words this concept is built on top of the per-cpu variables concept in the Linux kernel.
When the first thread wants to acquire a lock, it registers itself in the queue or in other words it will be added to the special queue and will acquire lock, because it is free for now. When the second thread will want to acquire the same lock before the first thread will release it, this thread adds its own copy of the lock variable into this queue. In this case the first thread will contain a next field which will point to the second thread. From this moment, the second thread will wait until the first thread will release its lock and notify next thread about this event. The first thread will be deleted from the queue and the second thread will be owner of a lock.
Schematically we can represent it like:
Empty queue:
+---------+
| |
| Queue |
| |
+---------+
First thread tries to acquire a lock:
+---------+ +----------------------------+
| | | |
| Queue |---->| First thread acquired lock |
| | | |
+---------+ +----------------------------+
Second thread tries to acquire a lock:
+---------+ +----------------------------------------+ +-------------------------+
| | | | | |
| Queue |---->| Second thread waits for first thread |<----| First thread holds lock |
| | | | | |
+---------+ +----------------------------------------+ +-------------------------+
Or the pseudocode:
void lock(...)
{
lock.next = NULL;
ancestor = put_lock_to_queue_and_return_ancestor(queue, lock);
// if we have ancestor, the lock already acquired and we
// need to wait until it will be released
if (ancestor)
{
lock.locked = 1;
ancestor.next = lock;
while (lock.is_locked == true)
;
}
// in other way we are owner of the lock and may exit
}
void unlock(...)
{
// do we need to notify somebody or we are alonw in the
// queue?
if (lock.next != NULL) {
// the while loop from the lock() function will be
// finished
lock.next.is_locked = false;
// delete ourself from the queue and exit
...
...
...
return;
}
// So, we have no next threads in the queue to notify about
// lock releasing event. Let's just put `0` to the lock, will
// delete ourself from the queue and exit.
}
The idea is simple, but the implementation of the queued spinlocks is more complex than this pseudocode. As I already wrote above, the queued spinlock mechanism is planned to be replacement for ticket spinlocks in the Linux kernel. But as you may remember, the usual spinlock fit into 32-bit word. But the MCS based lock does not fit to this size. As you may know spinlock_t type is widely used in the Linux kernel. In this case would have to rewrite a significant part of the Linux kernel, but this is unacceptable. Beside this, some kernel structures which contains a spinlock for protection can't grow. But anyway, implementation of the queued spinlocks in the Linux kernel based on this concept with some modifications which allows to fit it into 32 bits.
That's all about theory of the queued spinlocks, now let's consider how this mechanism is implemented in the Linux kernel. Implementation of the queued spinlocks looks more complex and tangled than implementation of ticket spinlocks, but the study with attention will lead to success.
API of queued spinlocks
Now we know a little about queued spinlocks from the theoretical side, time to see the implementation of this mechanism in the Linux kernel. As we saw above, the include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h header files provides a set of macro which are represent API for a spinlock acquiring, releasing and etc:
#define arch_spin_is_locked(l) queued_spin_is_locked(l)
#define arch_spin_is_contended(l) queued_spin_is_contended(l)
#define arch_spin_value_unlocked(l) queued_spin_value_unlocked(l)
#define arch_spin_lock(l) queued_spin_lock(l)
#define arch_spin_trylock(l) queued_spin_trylock(l)
#define arch_spin_unlock(l) queued_spin_unlock(l)
#define arch_spin_lock_flags(l, f) queued_spin_lock(l)
#define arch_spin_unlock_wait(l) queued_spin_unlock_wait(l)
All of these macros expand to the call of functions from the same header file. Additionally, we saw the qspinlock structure from the include/asm-generic/qspinlock_types.h header file which represents a queued spinlock in the Linux kernel:
typedef struct qspinlock {
atomic_t val;
} arch_spinlock_t;
As we may see, the qspinlock structure contains only one field - val. This field represents the state of a given spinlock. This 4 bytes field consists from following four parts:
0-7- locked byte;8- pending bit;16-17- two bit index which represents entry of theper-cpuarray of theMCSlock (will see it soon);18-31- contains number of processor which indicates tail of the queue.
and the 9-15 bytes are not used.
As we already know, each processor in the system has own copy of the lock. The lock is represented by the following structure:
struct mcs_spinlock {
struct mcs_spinlock *next;
int locked;
int count;
};
from the kernel/locking/mcs_spinlock.h header file. The first field represents a pointer to the next thread in the queue. The second field represents the state of the current thread in the queue, where 1 is lock already acquired and 0 in other way. And the last field of the mcs_spinlock structure represents nested locks. To understand what is it nested lock, imagine situation when a thread acquired lock, but was interrupted by the hardware interrupt and an interrupt handler tries to take a lock too. For this case, each processor has not just copy of the mcs_spinlock structure but array of these structures:
static DEFINE_PER_CPU_ALIGNED(struct mcs_spinlock, mcs_nodes[4]);
This array allows to make four attempts of a lock acquisition for the four events in following contexts:
- normal task context;
- hardware interrupt context;
- software interrupt context;
- non-maskable interrupt context.
Now let's return to the qspinlock structure and the API of the queued spinlocks. Before we will move to consider API of queued spinlocks, notice the val field of the qspinlock structure has type - atomic_t which represents atomic variable or one operation at a time variable. So, all operations with this field will be atomic. For example let's look at the reading value of the val API:
static __always_inline int queued_spin_is_locked(struct qspinlock *lock)
{
return atomic_read(&lock->val);
}
Ok, now we know data structures which represents queued spinlock in the Linux kernel and now time is to look at the implementation of the main function from the queued spinlocks API.
#define arch_spin_lock(l) queued_spin_lock(l)
Yes, this function is - queued_spin_lock. As we may understand from the function's name, it allows to acquire lock by the thread. This function is defined in the include/asm-generic/qspinlock_types.h header file and its implementation looks:
static __always_inline void queued_spin_lock(struct qspinlock *lock)
{
u32 val;
val = atomic_cmpxchg_acquire(&lock->val, 0, _Q_LOCKED_VAL);
if (likely(val == 0))
return;
queued_spin_lock_slowpath(lock, val);
}
Looks pretty easy, except the queued_spin_lock_slowpath function. We may see that it takes only one parameter. In our case this parameter will represent queued spinlock which will be locked. Let's consider the situation that queue with locks is empty for now and the first thread wanted to acquire lock. As we may see the queued_spin_lock function starts from the call of the atomic_cmpxchg_acquire macro. As you may guess from the name of this macro, it executes atomic CMPXCHG instruction which compares value of the second parameter (zero in our case) with the value of the first parameter (current state of the given spinlock) and if they are identical, it stores value of the _Q_LOCKED_VAL in the memory location which is pointed by the &lock->val and return the initial value from this memory location.
The atomic_cmpxchg_acquire macro is defined in the include/linux/atomic.h header file and expands to the call of the atomic_cmpxchg function:
#define atomic_cmpxchg_acquire atomic_cmpxchg
which is architecture specific. We consider x86_64 architecture, so in our case this header file will be arch/x86/include/asm/atomic.h and the implementation of the atomic_cmpxchg function is just returns the result of the cmpxchg macro:
static __always_inline int atomic_cmpxchg(atomic_t *v, int old, int new)
{
return cmpxchg(&v->counter, old, new);
}
This macro is defined in the arch/x86/include/asm/cmpxchg.h header file and looks:
#define cmpxchg(ptr, old, new) \
__cmpxchg(ptr, old, new, sizeof(*(ptr)))
#define __cmpxchg(ptr, old, new, size) \
__raw_cmpxchg((ptr), (old), (new), (size), LOCK_PREFIX)
As we may see, the cmpxchg macro expands to the __cpmxchg macro with the almost the same set of parameters. New additional parameter is the size of the atomic value. The __cmpxchg macro adds LOCK_PREFIX and expands to the __raw_cmpxchg macro where LOCK_PREFIX just LOCK instruction. After all, the __raw_cmpxchg does all job for us:
#define __raw_cmpxchg(ptr, old, new, size, lock) \
({
...
...
...
volatile u32 *__ptr = (volatile u32 *)(ptr); \
asm volatile(lock "cmpxchgl %2,%1" \
: "=a" (__ret), "+m" (*__ptr) \
: "r" (__new), "" (__old) \
: "memory"); \
...
...
...
})
After the atomic_cmpxchg_acquire macro will be executed, it returns the previous value of the memory location. Now only one thread tried to acquire a lock, so the val will be zero and we will return from the queued_spin_lock function:
val = atomic_cmpxchg_acquire(&lock->val, 0, _Q_LOCKED_VAL);
if (likely(val == 0))
return;
From this moment, our first thread will hold a lock. Notice that this behavior differs from the behavior which was described in the MCS algorithm. The thread acquired lock, but we didn't add it to the queue. As I already wrote the implementation of queued spinlocks concept is based on the MCS algorithm in the Linux kernel, but in the same time it has some difference like this for optimization purpose.
So the first thread have acquired lock and now let's consider that the second thread tried to acquire the same lock. The second thread will start from the same queued_spin_lock function, but the lock->val will contain 1 or _Q_LOCKED_VAL, because first thread already holds lock. So, in this case the queued_spin_lock_slowpath function will be called. The queued_spin_lock_slowpath function is defined in the kernel/locking/qspinlock.c source code file and starts from the following checks:
void queued_spin_lock_slowpath(struct qspinlock *lock, u32 val)
{
if (pv_enabled())
goto queue;
if (virt_spin_lock(lock))
return;
...
...
...
}
which check the state of the pvqspinlock. The pvqspinlock is queued spinlock in paravirtualized environment. As this chapter is related only to synchronization primitives in the Linux kernel, we skip these and other parts which are not directly related to the topic of this chapter. After these checks we compare our value which represents lock with the value of the _Q_PENDING_VAL macro and do nothing while this is true:
if (val == _Q_PENDING_VAL) {
while ((val = atomic_read(&lock->val)) == _Q_PENDING_VAL)
cpu_relax();
}
where cpu_relax is just NOP instruction. Above, we saw that the lock contains - pending bit. This bit represents thread which wanted to acquire lock, but it is already acquired by the other thread and in the same time queue is empty. In this case, the pending bit will be set and the queue will not be touched. This is done for optimization, because there are no need in unnecessary latency which will be caused by the cache invalidation in a touching of own mcs_spinlock array.
At the next step we enter into the following loop:
for (;;) {
if (val & ~_Q_LOCKED_MASK)
goto queue;
new = _Q_LOCKED_VAL;
if (val == new)
new |= _Q_PENDING_VAL;
old = atomic_cmpxchg_acquire(&lock->val, val, new);
if (old == val)
break;
val = old;
}
The first if clause here checks that state of the lock (val) is in locked or pending state. This means that first thread already acquired lock, second thread tried to acquire lock too, but now it is in pending state. In this case we need to start to build queue. We will consider this situation little later. In our case we are first thread holds lock and the second thread tries to do it too. After this check we create new lock in a locked state and compare it with the state of the previous lock. As you remember, the val contains state of the &lock->val which after the second thread will call the atomic_cmpxchg_acquire macro will be equal to 1. Both new and val values are equal so we set pending bit in the lock of the second thread. After this we need to check value of the &lock->val again, because the first thread may release lock before this moment. If the first thread did not released lock yet, the value of the old will be equal to the value of the val (because atomic_cmpxchg_acquire will return the value from the memory location which is pointed by the lock->val and now it is 1) and we will exit from the loop. As we exited from this loop, we are waiting for the first thread until it will release lock, clear pending bit, acquire lock and return:
smp_cond_acquire(!(atomic_read(&lock->val) & _Q_LOCKED_MASK));
clear_pending_set_locked(lock);
return;
Notice that we did not touch queue yet. We no need in it, because for two threads it just leads to unnecessary latency for memory access. In other case, the first thread may release it lock before this moment. In this case the lock->val will contain _Q_LOCKED_VAL | _Q_PENDING_VAL and we will start to build queue. We start to build queue by the getting the local copy of the mcs_nodes array of the processor which executes thread:
node = this_cpu_ptr(&mcs_nodes[0]);
idx = node->count++;
tail = encode_tail(smp_processor_id(), idx);
Additionally we calculate tail which will indicate the tail of the queue and index which represents an entry of the mcs_nodes array. After this we set the node to point to the correct of the mcs_nodes array, set locked to zero because this thread didn't acquire lock yet and next to NULL because we don't know anything about other queue entries:
node += idx;
node->locked = 0;
node->next = NULL;
We already touch per-cpu copy of the queue for the processor which executes current thread which wants to acquire lock, this means that owner of the lock may released it before this moment. So we may try to acquire lock again by the call of the queued_spin_trylock function.
if (queued_spin_trylock(lock))
goto release;
The queued_spin_trylock function is defined in the include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h header file and just does the same queued_spin_lock function that does:
static __always_inline int queued_spin_trylock(struct qspinlock *lock)
{
if (!atomic_read(&lock->val) &&
(atomic_cmpxchg_acquire(&lock->val, 0, _Q_LOCKED_VAL) == 0))
return 1;
return 0;
}
If the lock was successfully acquired we jump to the release label to release a node of the queue:
release:
this_cpu_dec(mcs_nodes[0].count);
because we no need in it anymore as lock is acquired. If the queued_spin_trylock was unsuccessful, we update tail of the queue:
old = xchg_tail(lock, tail);
and retrieve previous tail. The next step is to check that queue is not empty. In this case we need to link previous entry with the new:
if (old & _Q_TAIL_MASK) {
prev = decode_tail(old);
WRITE_ONCE(prev->next, node);
arch_mcs_spin_lock_contended(&node->locked);
}
After queue entries linked, we start to wait until reaching the head of queue. As we As we reached this, we need to do a check for new node which might be added during this wait:
next = READ_ONCE(node->next);
if (next)
prefetchw(next);
If the new node was added, we prefetch cache line from memory pointed by the next queue entry with the PREFETCHW instruction. We preload this pointer now for optimization purpose. We just became a head of queue and this means that there is upcoming MCS unlock operation and the next entry will be touched.
Yes, from this moment we are in the head of the queue. But before we are able to acquire a lock, we need to wait at least two events: current owner of a lock will release it and the second thread with pending bit will acquire a lock too:
smp_cond_acquire(!((val = atomic_read(&lock->val)) & _Q_LOCKED_PENDING_MASK));
After both threads will release a lock, the head of the queue will hold a lock. In the end we just need to update the tail of the queue and remove current head from it.
That's all.
Conclusion
This is the end of the second part of the synchronization primitives chapter in the Linux kernel. In the previous part we already met the first synchronization primitive spinlock provided by the Linux kernel which is implemented as ticket spinlock. In this part we saw another implementation of the spinlock mechanism - queued spinlock. In the next part we will continue to dive into synchronization primitives in the Linux kernel.
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