Re: [RFC] New locking primitive for 2.5

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 11:09:16PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, yodaiken wrote:
> 
> > So what's the difference between combi_spin and combi_mutex?
> > combi_spin becomes
> > 	if not mutex locked, spin
> > 	else sleep
> > Bizzare
> 
> no, the real optimization is that when spin meets spin, they will not
> mutex. If a mutex-user has it then spins turn into mutex, but that (is
> supposed to) happen rarely.

It seems like what you want is:
	if the lock is about to be released, spin, else sleep.
But what is proposed is
	if the lock is locked as a mutex, sleep, else spin
although I doubt either of these work - they seem like attempts to avoid
designing the code.

> 
> i think one example *could* be to turn inode->i_sem into a combi-lock. Eg.
> generic_file_llseek() could use the spin variant.
> 
> this is a real performance problem, i've seen scheduling storms in
> dbench-type runs due to llseek taking the inode semaphore.
	llseek:
		atomic_enquee request
		if no room gotta sleep
		else if trylock mutex
			return
		     else
			do work
			loop:
			     process any pending requests
			     release lock;
			     if pending_requests && !(trylock mutex) goto loop

			
			
> whether combi-locks truly bring performance benefits remains to be seen,
> but the patch definitely needs to provide some working example and some
> hard numbers for some real workload.

I think it's a lot easier to propose lock structures than to work on
reducing synchronization problems.

> 
> 	Ingo

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
Victor Yodaiken 
Finite State Machine Labs: The RTLinux Company.
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