pipe: use exclusive waits when reading or writing

This makes the pipe code use separate wait-queues and exclusive waiting
for readers and writers, avoiding a nasty thundering herd problem when
there are lots of readers waiting for data on a pipe (or, less commonly,
lots of writers waiting for a pipe to have space).

While this isn't a common occurrence in the traditional "use a pipe as a
data transport" case, where you typically only have a single reader and
a single writer process, there is one common special case: using a pipe
as a source of "locking tokens" rather than for data communication.

In particular, the GNU make jobserver code ends up using a pipe as a way
to limit parallelism, where each job consumes a token by reading a byte
from the jobserver pipe, and releases the token by writing a byte back
to the pipe.

This pattern is fairly traditional on Unix, and works very well, but
will waste a lot of time waking up a lot of processes when only a single
reader needs to be woken up when a writer releases a new token.

A simplified test-case of just this pipe interaction is to create 64
processes, and then pass a single token around between them (this
test-case also intentionally passes another token that gets ignored to
test the "wake up next" logic too, in case anybody wonders about it):

    #include <unistd.h>

    int main(int argc, char **argv)
    {
        int fd[2], counters[2];

        pipe(fd);
        counters[0] = 0;
        counters[1] = -1;
        write(fd[1], counters, sizeof(counters));

        /* 64 processes */
        fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork();

        do {
                int i;
                read(fd[0], &i, sizeof(i));
                if (i < 0)
                        continue;
                counters[0] = i+1;
                write(fd[1], counters, (1+(i & 1)) *sizeof(int));
        } while (counters[0] < 1000000);
        return 0;
    }

and in a perfect world, passing that token around should only cause one
context switch per transfer, when the writer of a token causes a
directed wakeup of just a single reader.

But with the "writer wakes all readers" model we traditionally had, on
my test box the above case causes more than an order of magnitude more
scheduling: instead of the expected ~1M context switches, "perf stat"
shows

        231,852.37 msec task-clock                #   15.857 CPUs utilized
        11,250,961      context-switches          #    0.049 M/sec
           616,304      cpu-migrations            #    0.003 M/sec
             1,648      page-faults               #    0.007 K/sec
 1,097,903,998,514      cycles                    #    4.735 GHz
   120,781,778,352      instructions              #    0.11  insn per cycle
    27,997,056,043      branches                  #  120.754 M/sec
       283,581,233      branch-misses             #    1.01% of all branches

      14.621273891 seconds time elapsed

       0.018243000 seconds user
       3.611468000 seconds sys

before this commit.

After this commit, I get

          5,229.55 msec task-clock                #    3.072 CPUs utilized
         1,212,233      context-switches          #    0.232 M/sec
           103,951      cpu-migrations            #    0.020 M/sec
             1,328      page-faults               #    0.254 K/sec
    21,307,456,166      cycles                    #    4.074 GHz
    12,947,819,999      instructions              #    0.61  insn per cycle
     2,881,985,678      branches                  #  551.096 M/sec
        64,267,015      branch-misses             #    2.23% of all branches

       1.702148350 seconds time elapsed

       0.004868000 seconds user
       0.110786000 seconds sys

instead. Much better.

[ Note! This kernel improvement seems to be very good at triggering a
  race condition in the make jobserver (in GNU make 4.2.1) for me. It's
  a long known bug that was fixed back in June 2017 by GNU make commit
  b552b0525198 ("[SV 51159] Use a non-blocking read with pselect to
  avoid hangs.").

  But there wasn't a new release of GNU make until 4.3 on Jan 19 2020,
  so a number of distributions may still have the buggy version. Some
  have backported the fix to their 4.2.1 release, though, and even
  without the fix it's quite timing-dependent whether the bug actually
  is hit. ]

Josh Triplett says:
 "I've been hammering on your pipe fix patch (switching to exclusive
  wait queues) for a month or so, on several different systems, and I've
  run into no issues with it. The patch *substantially* improves
  parallel build times on large (~100 CPU) systems, both with parallel
  make and with other things that use make's pipe-based jobserver.

  All current distributions (including stable and long-term stable
  distributions) have versions of GNU make that no longer have the
  jobserver bug"

Tested-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h b/include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h
index dbcfa6892384..d5765039652a 100644
--- a/include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h
+++ b/include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ struct pipe_buffer {
  **/
 struct pipe_inode_info {
 	struct mutex mutex;
-	wait_queue_head_t wait;
+	wait_queue_head_t rd_wait, wr_wait;
 	unsigned int head;
 	unsigned int tail;
 	unsigned int max_usage;