ARC: Workaround spinlock livelock in SMP SystemC simulation

Some ARC SMP systems lack native atomic R-M-W (LLOCK/SCOND) insns and
can only use atomic EX insn (reg with mem) to build higher level R-M-W
primitives. This includes a SystemC based SMP simulation model.

So rwlocks need to use a protecting spinlock for atomic cmp-n-exchange
operation to update reader(s)/writer count.

The spinlock operation itself looks as follows:

	mov reg, 1		; 1=locked, 0=unlocked
retry:
	EX reg, [lock]		; load existing, store 1, atomically
	BREQ reg, 1, rety	; if already locked, retry

In single-threaded simulation, SystemC alternates between the 2 cores
with "N" insn each based scheduling. Additionally for insn with global
side effect, such as EX writing to shared mem, a core switch is
enforced too.

Given that, 2 cores doing a repeated EX on same location, Linux often
got into a livelock e.g. when both cores were fiddling with tasklist
lock (gdbserver / hackbench) for read/write respectively as the
sequence diagram below shows:

           core1                                   core2
         --------                                --------
1. spin lock [EX r=0, w=1] - LOCKED
2. rwlock(Read)            - LOCKED
3. spin unlock  [ST 0]     - UNLOCKED
                                         spin lock [EX r=0,w=1] - LOCKED
                      -- resched core 1----

5. spin lock [EX r=1] - ALREADY-LOCKED

                      -- resched core 2----
6.                                       rwlock(Write) - READER-LOCKED
7.                                       spin unlock [ST 0]
8.                                       rwlock failed, retry again

9.                                       spin lock  [EX r=0, w=1]
                      -- resched core 1----

10  spinlock locked in #9, retry #5
11. spin lock [EX gets 1]
                      -- resched core 2----
...
...

The fix was to unlock using the EX insn too (step 7), to trigger another
SystemC scheduling pass which would let core1 proceed, eliding the
livelock.

Signed-off-by: Vineet Gupta <vgupta@synopsys.com>
This commit is contained in:
Vineet Gupta 2013-09-25 16:53:32 +05:30
parent 0752adfda1
commit 6c00350b57
1 changed files with 8 additions and 1 deletions

View File

@ -45,7 +45,14 @@ static inline int arch_spin_trylock(arch_spinlock_t *lock)
static inline void arch_spin_unlock(arch_spinlock_t *lock)
{
lock->slock = __ARCH_SPIN_LOCK_UNLOCKED__;
unsigned int tmp = __ARCH_SPIN_LOCK_UNLOCKED__;
__asm__ __volatile__(
" ex %0, [%1] \n"
: "+r" (tmp)
: "r"(&(lock->slock))
: "memory");
smp_mb();
}