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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2013-09-02 12:12:15 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2013-09-02 12:12:15 -0700
commitbc08b449ee14ace4d869adaa1bb35a44ce68d775 (patch)
tree133319a81192fad41aa999eac135e87905ab5bab /lib/Kconfig
parent2f4f12e571c4e2f50f3818a3c2544929145f75dd (diff)
downloadlwn-bc08b449ee14ace4d869adaa1bb35a44ce68d775.tar.gz
lwn-bc08b449ee14ace4d869adaa1bb35a44ce68d775.zip
lockref: implement lockless reference count updates using cmpxchg()
Instead of taking the spinlock, the lockless versions atomically check that the lock is not taken, and do the reference count update using a cmpxchg() loop. This is semantically identical to doing the reference count update protected by the lock, but avoids the "wait for lock" contention that you get when accesses to the reference count are contended. Note that a "lockref" is absolutely _not_ equivalent to an atomic_t. Even when the lockref reference counts are updated atomically with cmpxchg, the fact that they also verify the state of the spinlock means that the lockless updates can never happen while somebody else holds the spinlock. So while "lockref_put_or_lock()" looks a lot like just another name for "atomic_dec_and_lock()", and both optimize to lockless updates, they are fundamentally different: the decrement done by atomic_dec_and_lock() is truly independent of any lock (as long as it doesn't decrement to zero), so a locked region can still see the count change. The lockref structure, in contrast, really is a *locked* reference count. If you hold the spinlock, the reference count will be stable and you can modify the reference count without using atomics, because even the lockless updates will see and respect the state of the lock. In order to enable the cmpxchg lockless code, the architecture needs to do three things: (1) Make sure that the "arch_spinlock_t" and an "unsigned int" can fit in an aligned u64, and have a "cmpxchg()" implementation that works on such a u64 data type. (2) define a helper function to test for a spinlock being unlocked ("arch_spin_value_unlocked()") (3) select the "ARCH_USE_CMPXCHG_LOCKREF" config variable in its Kconfig file. This enables it for x86-64 (but not 32-bit, we'd need to make sure cmpxchg() turns into the proper cmpxchg8b in order to enable it for 32-bit mode). Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'lib/Kconfig')
-rw-r--r--lib/Kconfig10
1 files changed, 10 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/lib/Kconfig b/lib/Kconfig
index 71d9f81f6eed..65561716c16c 100644
--- a/lib/Kconfig
+++ b/lib/Kconfig
@@ -48,6 +48,16 @@ config STMP_DEVICE
config PERCPU_RWSEM
boolean
+config ARCH_USE_CMPXCHG_LOCKREF
+ bool
+
+config CMPXCHG_LOCKREF
+ def_bool y if ARCH_USE_CMPXCHG_LOCKREF
+ depends on SMP
+ depends on !GENERIC_LOCKBREAK
+ depends on !DEBUG_SPINLOCK
+ depends on !DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC
+
config CRC_CCITT
tristate "CRC-CCITT functions"
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