Re: [ANNOUNCE] mdb-2.6.27-rc2-ia32-08-07-08.patch

[Stefan Richter]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Stefan Richter wrote:
> > jmerkey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > > ftp://ftp.wolfmountaingroup.org/pub/mdb/mdb-2.6.27-rc2-ia32-08-07-08.patch 
[...]
> > The accessors rspin_lock() and rspin_try_lock() peek into spinlock_t and
> > may therefore not be fully portable.  Also, they and rspin_unlock()
> > don't look SMP safe:
> >
> >  
> > > +//
> > > +//   returns   0 - atomic lock occurred, processor assigned
> > > +//             1 - recusive count increased
> > > +//
> > > +
> > > +unsigned long rspin_lock(volatile rlock_t *rlock)
> > > +{
> > > +#if defined(CONFIG_SMP)
> > > +   register unsigned long proc = get_processor_id();
> > > +   register unsigned long retCode;
> > > +
> > > +   if (rlock->lock.raw_lock.slock && rlock->processor == proc)
> > >     
>
> Ticket locks will almost always have a non-zero slock.  It doesn't 
> indicate anything about the locked/unlocked state.  But this looks like 
> it's effectively doing a trylock:
>
>     if (!spin_trylock(rlock) && rlock->processor == proc) {
>         rlock->count++;
>         ...
>     } else {
>         rlock->processor = proc;
>         ...
>     }

Right.  This implemention also looks free of race conditions, provided that

  - rspin_lock, rspin_try_lock, and rspin_unlock are only called in
    contexts with disabled preemption and disabled local interrupts,

  - rspin_unlock() rewrites rlock->processor to "no CPU" before
    it drops the lock.  (The implementation in
    mdb-2.6.27-rc2-ia32-08-07-08.patch does so.)

BTW, the rspin_try_lock() in that patch wrong:  It always returns 0 
instead of having three branches of execution which return 0/1/-1.
--
Stefan Richter
-=====-==--- =--- -=--=
http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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