On PREEMPT_RT, rw_semaphore and rwlock_t locks are unfair to writers.
Readers can indefinitely acquire the lock unless the writer fully acquired
the lock, which might never happen if there is always a reader in the
critical section owning the lock.
Mel Gorman reported that since LTP-20220121 the dio_truncate test case
went from having 1 reader to having 16 readers and that number of readers
is sufficient to prevent the down_write ever succeeding while readers
exist. Eventually the test is killed after 30 minutes as a failure.
Mel proposed a timeout to limit how long a writer can be blocked until
the reader is forced into the slowpath.
Thomas argued that there is no added value by providing this timeout. From
a PREEMPT_RT point of view, there are no critical rw_semaphore or rwlock_t
locks left where the reader must be preferred.
Mitigate indefinite writer starvation by forcing the READER into the
slowpath once the WRITER attempts to acquire the lock.
Reported-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/877cwbq4cq.ffs@tglx
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230321161140.HMcQEhHb@linutronix.de
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
286deb7ec0