[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v2 1/2] ring: synchronize the load and store of the tail

[Gavin Hu <gavin.hu@arm.com>]

Synchronize the load-acquire of the tail and the store-release
within update_tail, the store release ensures all the ring operations,
enqueue or dequeue, are seen by the observers on the other side as soon
as they see the updated tail. The load-acquire is needed here as the
data dependency is not a reliable way for ordering as the compiler might
break it by saving to temporary values to boost performance.
When computing the free_entries and avail_entries, use atomic semantics
to load the heads and tails instead.

The patch was benchmarked with test/ring_perf_autotest and it decreases
the enqueue/dequeue latency by 5% ~ 27.6% with two lcores, the real gains
are dependent on the number of lcores, depth of the ring, SPSC or MPMC.
For 1 lcore, it also improves a little, about 3 ~ 4%.
It is a big improvement, in case of MPMC, with two lcores and ring size
of 32, it saves latency up to (3.26-2.36)/3.26 = 27.6%.

This patch is a bug fix, while the improvement is a bonus. In our analysis
the improvement comes from the cacheline pre-filling after hoisting load-
acquire from _atomic_compare_exchange_n up above.

The test command:
$sudo ./test/test/test -l 16-19,44-47,72-75,100-103 -n 4 --socket-mem=\
1024 -- -i

Test result with this patch(two cores):
 SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 5.86
 MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 10.15
 SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 1.94
 MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 2.36

In comparison of the test result without this patch:
 SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 6.67
 MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 8): 13.12
 SP/SC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 2.04
 MP/MC bulk enq/dequeue (size: 32): 3.26

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>
Reviewed-by: Jia He <justin.he@arm.com>
Acked-by: Jerin Jacob <jerin.jacob@caviumnetworks.com>
Tested-by: Jerin Jacob <jerin.jacob@caviumnetworks.com>
---
 lib/librte_ring/rte_ring_c11_mem.h | 20 ++++++++++++++++----
 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/librte_ring/rte_ring_c11_mem.h b/lib/librte_ring/rte_ring_c11_mem.h
index 94df3c4..4851763 100644
--- a/lib/librte_ring/rte_ring_c11_mem.h
+++ b/lib/librte_ring/rte_ring_c11_mem.h
@@ -67,13 +67,18 @@ __rte_ring_move_prod_head(struct rte_ring *r, unsigned int is_sp,
 		*old_head = __atomic_load_n(&r->prod.head,
 					__ATOMIC_ACQUIRE);
 
-		/*
-		 *  The subtraction is done between two unsigned 32bits value
+		/* load-acquire synchronize with store-release of ht->tail
+		 * in update_tail.
+		 */
+		const uint32_t cons_tail = __atomic_load_n(&r->cons.tail,
+							__ATOMIC_ACQUIRE);
+
+		/* The subtraction is done between two unsigned 32bits value
 		 * (the result is always modulo 32 bits even if we have
 		 * *old_head > cons_tail). So 'free_entries' is always between 0
 		 * and capacity (which is < size).
 		 */
-		*free_entries = (capacity + r->cons.tail - *old_head);
+		*free_entries = (capacity + cons_tail - *old_head);
 
 		/* check that we have enough room in ring */
 		if (unlikely(n > *free_entries))
@@ -131,15 +136,22 @@ __rte_ring_move_cons_head(struct rte_ring *r, int is_sc,
 	do {
 		/* Restore n as it may change every loop */
 		n = max;
+
 		*old_head = __atomic_load_n(&r->cons.head,
 					__ATOMIC_ACQUIRE);
 
+		/* this load-acquire synchronize with store-release of ht->tail
+		 * in update_tail.
+		 */
+		const uint32_t prod_tail = __atomic_load_n(&r->prod.tail,
+					__ATOMIC_ACQUIRE);
+
 		/* The subtraction is done between two unsigned 32bits value
 		 * (the result is always modulo 32 bits even if we have
 		 * cons_head > prod_tail). So 'entries' is always between 0
 		 * and size(ring)-1.
 		 */
-		*entries = (r->prod.tail - *old_head);
+		*entries = (prod_tail - *old_head);
 
 		/* Set the actual entries for dequeue */
 		if (n > *entries)
-- 
2.7.4