GitLab

Change mutex contention behaviour such that it will sometimes busy wait on
acquisition - moving its behaviour closer to that of spinlocks.

This concept got ported to mainline from the -rt tree, where it was originally
implemented for rtmutexes by Steven Rostedt, based on work by Gregory Haskins.

Testing with Ingo's test-mutex application (http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/50)
gave a 345% boost for VFS scalability on my testbox:

 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
 avg ops/sec:               296604

 # ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
 avg ops/sec:               85870

The key criteria for the busy wait is that the lock owner has to be running on
a (different) cpu. The idea is that as long as the owner is running, there is a
fair chance it'll release the lock soon, and thus we'll be better off spinning
instead of blocking/scheduling.

Since regular mutexes (as opposed to rtmutexes) do not atomically track the
owner, we add the owner in a non-atomic fash...