hazptr: Implement Hazard Pointers

2026-07-23T16:58:54+00:00

This API provides existence guarantees of objects through Hazard Pointers [1] (hazptr). Its main benefit over RCU is that it allows fast reclaim of HP-protected pointers without needing to wait for a grace period. This implementation has 4 statically allocated hazard pointer slots per cpu for the fast path, and relies on a on-stack backup slot allocated by the hazard pointer user as fallback in case no per-cpu slot is available. It integrates with the scheduler to migrate per-CPU slots to the backup slot on context switch. This ensures that the per-CPU slots won't be used by blocked or preempted tasks holding on hazard pointers for a long time. References: [1]: M. M. Michael, "Hazard pointers: safe memory reclamation for lock-free objects," in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 491-504, June 2004 Link: https://lpc.events/event/19/contributions/2082/ Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/j3scdl5iymjlxavomgc6u5ndg3svhab6ga23dr36o4f5mt333w@7xslvq6b6hmv/ Link: https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1731/ Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers Cc: Nicholas Piggin Cc: Michael Ellerman Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" Cc: Will Deacon Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Boqun Feng Cc: Alan Stern Cc: John Stultz Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Andrew Morton Cc: Frederic Weisbecker Cc: Joel Fernandes Cc: Josh Triplett Cc: Uladzislau Rezki Cc: Steven Rostedt Cc: Lai Jiangshan Cc: Zqiang Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: Waiman Long Cc: Mark Rutland Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: Vlastimil Babka Cc: maged.michael@gmail.com Cc: Mateusz Guzik Cc: Jonas Oberhauser Cc: Cc: Cc: Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

linux-next.git/kernel/hazptr.c, branch master

hazptr: Implement Hazard Pointers