ring/c11: keep deterministic order allowing retry to work
authorGavin Hu <gavin.hu@arm.com>
Fri, 9 Nov 2018 11:42:46 +0000 (19:42 +0800)
committerThomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>
Tue, 13 Nov 2018 15:57:58 +0000 (16:57 +0100)
commit86757c2c3ed5006940f93725d39131dfb0d09b60
treee6cf7cc445632637e838719c161df34dd652fc79
parent5d08fecdd39f2373713a0475b75a4126800c9acf
ring/c11: keep deterministic order allowing retry to work

Use case scenario:
1) Thread 1 is enqueuing. It reads prod.head and gets stalled for some
   reasons (running out of cpu time, preempted,...)
2) Thread 2 is enqueuing. It succeeds in enqueuing and moves prod.head
   forward.
3) Thread 3 is dequeuing. It succeeds in dequeuing and moves the cons.tail
   beyond the prod.head read by thread 1.
4) Thread 1 is re-scheduled. It reads cons.tail.

cpu1(producer)      cpu2(producer)          cpu3(consumer)
load r->prod.head
    ^               load r->prod.head
    |               load r->cons.tail
    |               store r->prod.head(+n)
  stalled           <-- enqueue ----->
    |               store r->prod.tail(+n)
    |                                        load r->cons.head
    |                                        load r->prod.tail
    |                                        store r->cons.head(+n)
    |                                        <...dequeue.....>
    v                                        store r->cons.tail(+n)
load r->cons.tail

For thread 1, the __atomic_compare_exchange_n detects the outdated
prod.head and retry the flow with the new one. This retry flow works ok on
strong ordering platform(eg:x86). But for weak ordering platforms(arm,
ppc), loading cons.tail and prod.head might be re-ordered, prod.head is new
but cons.tail becomes too old, the retry flow, based on the detection of
outdated head, does not trigger as expected, thus the outdate cons.tail
causes wrong free_entries.

Similarly, for dequeuing, outdated prod.tail leads to wrong avail_entries.

The fix is to keep the deterministic order of two loads allowing the retry
to work.

Run the ring perf test on the following testbed:
HW: ThunderX2 B0 CPU CN9975 v2.0, 2 sockets, 28core, 4 threads/core, 2.5GHz
OS: Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS, Kernel: 4.15.0-36-generic
DPDK: 18.08, Configuration: arm64-armv8a-linuxapp-gcc
gcc: 8.1.0
$sudo ./test/test/test -l 16-19,44-47,72-75,100-103 -n 4 \
--socket-mem=1024 -- -i

Without the patch:
*** Testing using two physical cores ***
SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 5.64
MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 9.58
SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 1.98
MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 2.30

With the patch:
*** Testing using two physical cores ***
SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 5.75
MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 10.18
SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 1.80
MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 2.34

The results showed the thread fence degrade the performance slightly, but
it is required for correctness.

Fixes: 39368ebfc6 ("ring: introduce C11 memory model barrier option")
Cc: stable@dpdk.org
Signed-off-by: Gavin Hu <gavin.hu@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Honnappa Nagarahalli <honnappa.nagarahalli@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Steve Capper <steve.capper@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Ola Liljedahl <ola.liljedahl@arm.com>
lib/librte_ring/rte_ring_c11_mem.h