The tri-state mutex implementation (unlocked, locked, sleeping) avoids
sleep/wake syscalls when contention is low or absent, but its
performance degrades when many threads are contending for a mutex to
execute a fast critical section.
A fast critical section means frequent unlock2 calls. Each of those
finds the mutex in the "sleeping" state and so wakes a sleeping thread,
even if many other threads are already awake and in the spin loop of
lock2 attempting to acquire the mutex for themselves. Many spinning
threads means wasting energy and CPU time that could be used by other
processes on the machine. Many threads all spinning on the same cache
line leads to performance collapse.
Merge the futex- and semaphore-based mutex implementations by using a
semaphore abstraction for futex platforms. Then, add a bit to the mutex
state word that communicates whether one of the waiting threads is awake
and spinning. When threads in lock2 see the new "spinning" bit, they can
sleep immediately. In unlock2, the "spinning" bit means we can save a
syscall and not wake a sleeping thread.
This brings up the real possibility of starvation: waiting threads are
able to enter a deeper sleep than before, since one of their peers can
volunteer to be the sole "spinning" thread and thus cause unlock2 to
skip the semawakeup call. Additionally, the waiting threads form a LIFO
stack so any wakeups that do occur will target threads that have gone to
sleep most recently. Counteract those effects by periodically waking the
thread at the bottom of the stack and allowing it to spin.
Exempt sched.lock from most of the new behaviors; it's often used by
several threads in sequence to do thread-specific work, so low-latency
handoff is a priority over improved throughput.
Gate use of this implementation behind GOEXPERIMENT=spinbitmutex, so
it's easy to disable. Enable it by default on supported platforms (the
most efficient implementation requires atomic.Xchg8).