Re: [PATCH 1/19] MUTEX: Introduce simple mutex implementation

From: Jeff Dike
Date: Thu Dec 15 2005 - 14:46:48 EST


On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 09:45:10AM -0800, Luck, Tony wrote:
> There was a USENIX paper a couple of decades ago that described how
> to do a fast s/w disable of interrupts on machines where really disabling
> interrupts was expensive. The rough gist was that the spl[1-7]()
> functions would just set a flag in memory to hold the desired interrupt
> mask. If an interrupt actually occurred when it was s/w blocked, the
> handler would set a pending flag, and just rfi with interrupts disabled.
> Then the splx() code checked to see whether there was a pending interrupt
> and dealt with it if there was.

... and this is currently implemented (but not yet merged to mainline) in
UML.

Jeff
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