mutex: Improve the scalability of optimistic spinning
There is a scalability issue for current implementation of optimistic mutex spin in the kernel. It is found on a 8 node 64 core Nehalem-EX system (HT mode). The intention of the optimistic mutex spin is to busy wait and spin on a mutex if the owner of the mutex is running, in the hope that the mutex will be released soon and be acquired, without the thread trying to acquire mutex going to sleep. However, when we have a large number of threads, contending for the mutex, we could have the mutex grabbed by other thread, and then another ……, and we will keep spinning, wasting cpu cycles and adding to the contention. One possible fix is to quit spinning and put the current thread on wait-list if mutex lock switch to a new owner while we spin, indicating heavy contention (see the patch included). I did some testing on a 8 socket Nehalem-EX system with a total of 64 cores. Using Ingo's test-mutex program that creates/delete files with 256 threads (htt...
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