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Re: mutexes, locks and so on...
On Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:22:03 +0100
Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
> 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?
Isnt that because of "priority inversion"?
>
> 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
--
NetBSD - Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability
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