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Re: The missing membar_X() directive



In article <7C6F6029-5DB3-4C8A-ABFD-5F73E669526B%gmail.com@localhost>,
Dennis Ferguson  <dennis.c.ferguson%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I have a route lookup data structure which is fairly speedy and
>which is designed to be modified (i.e. routes added or deleted)
>while lookups are concurrently being done.  This is part of a
>project to produce a fully SMP-capable networking stack.
>
>Unfortunately, however, I wasn't able to eliminate all ordering
>dependencies from the structure; for it to work properly some
>writes to the structure must be seen by readers in the order
>they were written.  This in general requires calling membar_producer()
>between the writes that need to be seen in order, and membar_consumer()
>between reads which need to see the same order.  While calling
>membar_producer() in the writer isn't a problem, calling membar_consumer()
>in the readers turns out to be a big problem; that's an expensive
>function in the cases I've tried, and that expense is paid in the
>most heavily used, performance-critical lookup functions.
>
>The thing about the latter functions, however, is that each read
>they do from the structure is dependent on the previous read; what
>it reads tells it how to compute what to read next.  This is good,
>since I found this very nice paper
>
>    http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/scalability/paper/whymb.2010.06.07c.pdf
>
>which has a table and text on page 16 which indicates that the only CPU which
>Linux runs on which may reorder dependent loads is the Alpha.  Everything
>else can run without the read barriers.
>
>So I now have a macro which calls membar_consumer() if compiled for an
>Alpha, but does nothing when compiled for anything else.  If there were
>a system membar_X() function which did the right thing for this case, however,
>it wouldn't need the machine-dependent #ifdef.

Would RCU be helpful in your scenario?

christos



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