here's my bias: i think manfred's suggestion is reasonable.
there really isn't any reason to cut off all interrupts (on dual CPU
hardware) while waiting for an IRQ-masked critical section, especially if
you can handle an interrupt during the time you were spinning rather than
the time you were supposed to be running in the critical section.
essentially you're saying that you want to be sure that the bad cases are
visible so we can fix them. there would still be tools to measure how
contended are specific spinlocks. i would prefer using such a tool since
it gives me empirical data, rather than waiting to experience slight
jerkiness in my GUI, for instance. in other words, why do we need to
prevent a subjective improvement to preserve a subjective indicator of
spinlock contention?
(more time at the pub might be an acceptible answer :)
besides, making the IRQ-masked spinlocks interruptible might mean that
we're more likely to interrupt a deadlock via SysRq, right?
- Chuck Lever
-- corporate: <chuckl@netscape.com> personal: <chucklever@netscape.net> or <cel@monkey.org>The Linux Scalability project: http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/linux-scalability/
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