ARC: Workaround spinlock livelock in SMP SystemC simulation

Some ARC SMP systems lack native atomic R-M-W (LLOCK/SCOND) insns and
can only use atomic EX insn (reg with mem) to build higher level R-M-W
primitives. This includes a SystemC based SMP simulation model.

So rwlocks need to use a protecting spinlock for atomic cmp-n-exchange
operation to update reader(s)/writer count.

The spinlock operation itself looks as follows:

	mov reg, 1		; 1=locked, 0=unlocked
retry:
	EX reg, [lock]		; load existing, store 1, atomically
	BREQ reg, 1, rety	; if already locked, retry

In single-threaded simulation, SystemC alternates between the 2 cores
with "N" insn each based scheduling. Additionally for insn with global
side effect, such as EX writing to shared mem, a core switch is
enforced too.

Given that, 2 cores doing a repeated EX on same location, Linux often
got into a livelock e.g. when both cores were fiddling with tasklist
lock (gdbserver / hackbench) for read/write respectively as the
sequence diagram below shows:

           core1                                   core2
         --------                                --------
1. spin lock [EX r=0, w=1] - LOCKED
2. rwlock(Read)            - LOCKED
3. spin unlock  [ST 0]     - UNLOCKED
                                         spin lock [EX r=0,w=1] - LOCKED
                      -- resched core 1----

5. spin lock [EX r=1] - ALREADY-LOCKED

                      -- resched core 2----
6.                                       rwlock(Write) - READER-LOCKED
7.                                       spin unlock [ST 0]
8.                                       rwlock failed, retry again

9.                                       spin lock  [EX r=0, w=1]
                      -- resched core 1----

10  spinlock locked in #9, retry #5
11. spin lock [EX gets 1]
                      -- resched core 2----
...
...

The fix was to unlock using the EX insn too (step 7), to trigger another
SystemC scheduling pass which would let core1 proceed, eliding the
livelock.

Signed-off-by: Vineet Gupta <vgupta@synopsys.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions