Re: Robust futexes

From: Rusty Russell
Date: Thu Mar 09 2006 - 20:38:24 EST


On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 08:23 -0800, Darren Hart wrote:
> Rusty Russell wrote:
> telling the kernel that the lock is the tid allows the
> > kernel to do prio inheritence etc. in future.
>
> Priority Inheritance has come up a couple of times in relation to Ingo's new
> LightWeight Robust Futexes. Ingo has said that PI is orthogonal to LWRF, but I
> don't think we've heard if there are plans already in the works (or in his head
> :-) for PI. Rusty's comment above reads as "the current LWRF implementation
> cannot support PI" - is there something about it that makes PI impractical to
> implement?

Hi Darren!

Ingo's approach is indeed orthogonal. But the obvious approach to PI
etc is to tell the kernel who is holding the lock, by making the lock
value == TID of the holder. If we are heading towards this anyway, the
kernel could use this to implement robust mutexes, too, although not
with a 100% guarantee (due to tid wrap). Ingo doesn't like that,
though.

Hope that clarifies!
Rusty.
--
ccontrol: http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/ccontrol

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