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mutexes, locks and so on...



I've been looking through the netbsd mutex, and lock implementations the last few days, with the intent to try and improve the performance on the VAX, which has suffered somewhat in performance with NetBSD (maybe other platforms as well, but they might not feel the pain that much :-) ).

While doing this, I have stumbled upon a few questions, as well as some general observations.

A few observations first.
The mutex implementation in place now, is nice in many ways, as it is rather open to different implementations based on what the hardware can do. However, I found that only one platform (hppa) is currently using this. All others rely on the __HAVE_SIMPLE_MUTEXES implementation, which utilize a CAS function. Obviously the VAX does not have a CAS, and it is rather costly to simulate it, so I'm working on getting away from this. (Does really all other platforms have a CAS?)

What would be nice here is if it had been possible to inline the mutex_lock and mutex_unlock (as well as their spin equivalents) functions, but I found out (the hard way) that this is not possible.

I also found out that mutex spin locks are more or less equivalent to the old scheme of using splraise() and splx(). However, I noticed one big difference. In the old days, splraise() and splx() were always handled as a pair. You did not do:

a = splraise(..)
b = splraise(..)
splx(a)
splx(b)

which would have been very broken.

With mutex_spin, you instead store the original spl at the first mutex_spin_enter, and later calls to mutex_spin_enter can only possibly raise the ipl further. At mutex_spin_exit, we do not lower the spl again, until the final mutex_spin_exit, which resets the spl to the value as before any mutex was held. The cause a slightly different behaviour, as the spl will continue to possibly be very high, even though you are only holding a low ipl mutex. While it obviously don't cause a system to fail, it can introduce delays which might not be neccesary, and could in theory cause interrupts to be dropped that needn't be.

Is this a conscious design? Do we not expect/enforce mutexes to be released in the reverse order they were acquired?


Moving on to locks:
the simple lock defined in lock.h is easy enough, and I haven't found any problems with it. The rwlock, however, is written with the explicit assumption that there is a CAS function. It would be great if that code were a little more like the mutex code, so that alternative implementations could be done for architectures where you'd like to do it in other ways. Is the reason for this not being the case just an oversight, a lack of time and resources, or is there some underlying reason why this could not be done?

Also, there are a few places in the code in the kernel, where atomic_cas is called explicitly. Wouldn't it be better if such code were abstracted out, so we didn't depend on specific cpu instructions in the MI code?

Well, just a few thoughts, and a question for all of you... I'll happily listed to your wisdom as I try to get my alternative locking on the VAX running...

        Johnny


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