On Jun 9, 2005, at 11:59 PM, Daniel Carosone wrote:

> I rather like the way Xen's request-ring structure works, for solving
> a not-dissimilar problem of abstracting hardware driver interfaces
> across the VMM while minimising contention between producers and
> consumers (two sets of ring-state pointers).  Perhaps something
> similar would be suitable for feeding hardware interrupt results into
> within-kernel_lock code.

This is also not dissimilar to how host -> NIC communication rings  
work.  Unfortunately, for them to work reliably, you still need inter- 
processor synchronization ... just not locks; instead, you need to  
make sure that memory barrier operations are performed in the right  
places.

-- thorpej