Re: sem_lock() vs qspinlocks

From: Waiman Long
Date: Sat May 21 2016 - 00:01:18 EST


On 05/20/2016 08:59 PM, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
On Fri, 20 May 2016, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 04:47:43PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:

>Similarly, and I know you hate it, but afaict, then semantically
>queued_spin_is_contended() ought to be:
>
>- return atomic_read(&lock->val) & ~_Q_LOCKED_MASK;
>+ return atomic_read(&lock->val);
>

Looking for contended lock, you need to consider the lock waiters also. So
looking at the whole word is right.

No, you _only_ need to look at the lock waiters.

Is there anyway to do this in a single atomic_read? My thought is that otherwise
we could further expand the race window of when the lock is and isn't
contended (as returned to by the user). Ie avoiding crap like:

atomic_read(&lock->val) && atomic_read(&lock->val) != _Q_LOCKED_VAL

In any case, falsely returning for the 'locked, uncontended' case, vs completely
ignoring waiters is probably the lesser evil :).

Thanks,
Davidlohr

The existing code is doing that, but I would argue that including the locked, but uncontended case isn't a bad idea.

Cheers,
Longman