From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
[ Upstream commit fda31c50292a5062332fa0343c084bd9f46604d9 ]
When queueing a signal, we increment both the users count of pending signals (for RLIMIT_SIGPENDING tracking) and we increment the refcount of the user struct itself (because we keep a reference to the user in the signal structure in order to correctly account for it when freeing).
That turns out to be fairly expensive, because both of them are atomic updates, and particularly under extreme signal handling pressure on big machines, you can get a lot of cache contention on the user struct. That can then cause horrid cacheline ping-pong when you do these multiple accesses.
So change the reference counting to only pin the user for the _first_ pending signal, and to unpin it when the last pending signal is dequeued. That means that when a user sees a lot of concurrent signal queuing - which is the only situation when this matters - the only atomic access needed is generally the 'sigpending' count update.
This was noticed because of a particularly odd timing artifact on a dual-socket 96C/192T Cascade Lake platform: when you get into bad contention, on that machine for some reason seems to be much worse when the contention happens in the upper 32-byte half of the cacheline.
As a result, the kernel test robot will-it-scale 'signal1' benchmark had an odd performance regression simply due to random alignment of the 'struct user_struct' (and pointed to a completely unrelated and apparently nonsensical commit for the regression).
Avoiding the double increments (and decrements on the dequeueing side, of course) makes for much less contention and hugely improved performance on that will-it-scale microbenchmark.
Quoting Feng Tang:
"It makes a big difference, that the performance score is tripled! bump from original 17000 to 54000. Also the gap between 5.0-rc6 and 5.0-rc6+Jiri's patch is reduced to around 2%"
[ The "2% gap" is the odd cacheline placement difference on that platform: under the extreme contention case, the effect of which half of the cacheline was hot was 5%, so with the reduced contention the odd timing artifact is reduced too ]
It does help in the non-contended case too, but is not nearly as noticeable.
Reported-and-tested-by: Feng Tang feng.tang@intel.com Cc: Eric W. Biederman ebiederm@xmission.com Cc: Huang, Ying ying.huang@intel.com Cc: Philip Li philip.li@intel.com Cc: Andi Kleen andi.kleen@intel.com Cc: Jiri Olsa jolsa@redhat.com Cc: Peter Zijlstra peterz@infradead.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin sashal@kernel.org --- kernel/signal.c | 23 ++++++++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
diff --git a/kernel/signal.c b/kernel/signal.c index 08911bb6fe9ab..c42eaf39b5729 100644 --- a/kernel/signal.c +++ b/kernel/signal.c @@ -407,27 +407,32 @@ __sigqueue_alloc(int sig, struct task_struct *t, gfp_t flags, int override_rlimi { struct sigqueue *q = NULL; struct user_struct *user; + int sigpending;
/* * Protect access to @t credentials. This can go away when all * callers hold rcu read lock. + * + * NOTE! A pending signal will hold on to the user refcount, + * and we get/put the refcount only when the sigpending count + * changes from/to zero. */ rcu_read_lock(); - user = get_uid(__task_cred(t)->user); - atomic_inc(&user->sigpending); + user = __task_cred(t)->user; + sigpending = atomic_inc_return(&user->sigpending); + if (sigpending == 1) + get_uid(user); rcu_read_unlock();
- if (override_rlimit || - atomic_read(&user->sigpending) <= - task_rlimit(t, RLIMIT_SIGPENDING)) { + if (override_rlimit || likely(sigpending <= task_rlimit(t, RLIMIT_SIGPENDING))) { q = kmem_cache_alloc(sigqueue_cachep, flags); } else { print_dropped_signal(sig); }
if (unlikely(q == NULL)) { - atomic_dec(&user->sigpending); - free_uid(user); + if (atomic_dec_and_test(&user->sigpending)) + free_uid(user); } else { INIT_LIST_HEAD(&q->list); q->flags = 0; @@ -441,8 +446,8 @@ static void __sigqueue_free(struct sigqueue *q) { if (q->flags & SIGQUEUE_PREALLOC) return; - atomic_dec(&q->user->sigpending); - free_uid(q->user); + if (atomic_dec_and_test(&q->user->sigpending)) + free_uid(q->user); kmem_cache_free(sigqueue_cachep, q); }