Re: [PATCH] Convert powerpc simple spinlocks into ticket locks

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 11:37:37AM +0100, Torsten Duwe wrote:
> x86 has them, MIPS has them, ARM has them, even ia64 has them:
> ticket locks. They reduce memory bus and cache pressure especially
> for contended spinlocks, increasing performance.
> 
> This patch is a port of the x86 spin locks, mostly written in C,
> to the powerpc, introducing inline asm where needed. The pSeries
> directed yield for vCPUs is taken care of by an additional "holder"
> field in the lock.
> 

A few questions; what's with the ppc64 holder thing? Not having a 32bit
spinlock_t is sad.

Can you pair lwarx with sthcx ? I couldn't immediately find the answer
in the PowerISA doc. If so I think you can do better by being able to
atomically load both tickets but only storing the head without affecting
the tail.

In that case you can avoid the ll/sc on unlock, because only the lock
owner can modify the tail, so you can use a single half-word store.
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