[Just going through some old mail]

I was reviewing some spl and locking models for SMP.  SVR4/MP combines
locking primitives with spl and Solaris is completely redesigned to the
implementation to use kernel threads instead for interrupts so it can use
the same locking model as the rest of the code. 

What does Digital, SGI and Sequent do?

Regards,


Mike Hancock

On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Bruce Evans wrote:

> >   http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~chris/papers/cli.ps
> 
> >Draft of paper discussing different hardware synchronization schemes
> >on the x86.  It discusses how to avoid talking to the PIC/8259 which
> >scheduling critical sections.  While it probably won't save much on
> >lightly loaded systems, I have to wonder how it would effect heavily
> >loaded systems such wcarchive.cdrom.com...
> 
> FreeBSD has never used the PIC for spl*().  I fixed spl*() in
> 386BSD-0.0.  I wouldn't have considered using the PIC in the first
> place.  Non-multitasking x86 systems normally use cli/sti to get
> essentially only two interrupt priorities (the PIC provides some
> priority stuff but it is not much use), and this works OK for multi-
> tasking provided the cricial sections are short.
> 
> Even cli/sti has become much slower than the memory-based spl's used
> in FreeBSD.  On Pentium's, pushfl/cli/popfl takes 14 cycles, while
> `s = splhigh(); splx(s);' takes 4 cycles assuming no cache or
> branch target buffer misses.
> 
> The effect of fixing the spl's was very large even on unloaded systems.
> TCP to localhost speeded up by 25% or so on a 486/33, because it
> involves a surprisingly large number of spl's (40000/MB IIRC, but this
> seems too surprisingly large) and each spl pair used 26 PIC i/o
> instructions under 386BSD-0.0.  The speedup would be a factor of about
> 10-20 on a fast Pentium (from 1 or 2 MB/s to about 20MB/s).  Of course,
> a better implementation using the PIC would only involve 2 or 4 i/o
> instructions per spl pair.
> 
> spl is probably fundamentally wrong for SMP.  I haven't thought much
> about what to use instead.
> 
> FreeBSD still uses the PIC for masking in-service interrupts.  This
> could probably be avoided for edge-sensitive interrupts by depending
> on the interrupt signal staying high until the interrupt is dismissed
> so that another edge doesn't occur until the next i/o completion.  At
> worst, the PIC could be used only for noisy interrupts.  I haven't
> tried this because the benefits would be small.  Hardware interrupts
> are much rarer than spls.
> 
> Bruce
>