Re: [RFC] New locking primitive for 2.5

From: yodaiken@fsmlabs.com
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 15:15:50 EST


On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 03:08:02PM -0500, Robert Love wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 14:58, yodaiken@fsmlabs.com wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 01:40:59PM -0500, Robert Love wrote:
> > > We shouldn't engage in wholesale changing of spinlocks to semaphores
> > > without a priority-inheritance mechanism. And _that_ is the bigger
> > > issue ...
> >
> > Cool. We can then have the Solaris "this usually doesn't fail on test" priority
> > inherit read/write lock. I can hardly wait.
>
> Or, we could do things right and not.

I'd love to hear how things could be done right here.
There seem to be 3 choices for reader writer locks
        1. Do the right thing and say no to inheritance: and this
        means no inheritance on mutexes either.
        2. Use the Solaris - "sometimes kinda works" method.
        3. Make readers/writer locks very slow and expensive e.g
        a complete list of reader identities that with atomic insert/delete
        and with check for uniqueness on insert! Not to mention the write
        promotion, any interactions between the "favor writes" design it should
        have and inheritance, links for a mutex inheriting lock to follow down
        the complete tree of paths from the r/w lock ...

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
Victor Yodaiken 
Finite State Machine Labs: The RTLinux Company.
 www.fsmlabs.com  www.rtlinux.com

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