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locking/rwbase: Mitigate indefinite writer starvation
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On PREEMPT_RT, rw_semaphore and rwlock_t locks are unfair to writers.
Readers can indefinitely acquire the lock unless the writer fully acquired
the lock, which might never happen if there is always a reader in the
critical section owning the lock.

Mel Gorman reported that since LTP-20220121 the dio_truncate test case
went from having 1 reader to having 16 readers and that number of readers
is sufficient to prevent the down_write ever succeeding while readers
exist. Eventually the test is killed after 30 minutes as a failure.

Mel proposed a timeout to limit how long a writer can be blocked until
the reader is forced into the slowpath.

Thomas argued that there is no added value by providing this timeout.  From
a PREEMPT_RT point of view, there are no critical rw_semaphore or rwlock_t
locks left where the reader must be preferred.

Mitigate indefinite writer starvation by forcing the READER into the
slowpath once the WRITER attempts to acquire the lock.

Reported-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/877cwbq4cq.ffs@tglx
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
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Sebastian Andrzej Siewior authored and Ingo Molnar committed Apr 29, 2023
1 parent 0685506 commit 286deb7
Showing 1 changed file with 0 additions and 9 deletions.
9 changes: 0 additions & 9 deletions kernel/locking/rwbase_rt.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -72,15 +72,6 @@ static int __sched __rwbase_read_lock(struct rwbase_rt *rwb,
int ret;

raw_spin_lock_irq(&rtm->wait_lock);
/*
* Allow readers, as long as the writer has not completely
* acquired the semaphore for write.
*/
if (atomic_read(&rwb->readers) != WRITER_BIAS) {
atomic_inc(&rwb->readers);
raw_spin_unlock_irq(&rtm->wait_lock);
return 0;
}

/*
* Call into the slow lock path with the rtmutex->wait_lock
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