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authorMartin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>2006-09-30 23:27:43 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org>2006-10-01 00:39:21 -0700
commitef6edc9746dc2bfdacf44eefd5f881179971c478 (patch)
treee8670e918a852978b2e93e189936f327be072284 /CREDITS
parente3e5fc91d9828a9b94a3992de47d47d2d2e34ec6 (diff)
[PATCH] Directed yield: cpu_relax variants for spinlocks and rw-locks
On systems running with virtual cpus there is optimization potential in regard to spinlocks and rw-locks. If the virtual cpu that has taken a lock is known to a cpu that wants to acquire the same lock it is beneficial to yield the timeslice of the virtual cpu in favour of the cpu that has the lock (directed yield). With CONFIG_PREEMPT="n" this can be implemented by the architecture without common code changes. Powerpc already does this. With CONFIG_PREEMPT="y" the lock loops are coded with _raw_spin_trylock, _raw_read_trylock and _raw_write_trylock in kernel/spinlock.c. If the lock could not be taken cpu_relax is called. A directed yield is not possible because cpu_relax doesn't know anything about the lock. To be able to yield the lock in favour of the current lock holder variants of cpu_relax for spinlocks and rw-locks are needed. The new _raw_spin_relax, _raw_read_relax and _raw_write_relax primitives differ from cpu_relax insofar that they have an argument: a pointer to the lock structure. Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Cc: Haavard Skinnemoen <hskinnemoen@atmel.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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