On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Rik van Riel <r...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> If the call is a semop manipulating just one semaphore in
> an array with multiple semaphores, the read/write lock for
> the semaphore array is taken in shared (read) mode, and the
> individual semaphore's lock is taken.
You know, we do something like this already elsewhere, and I think we
do it slightly better. See the mm_take_all_locks() logic in mm/mmap.c.
The optimal strategy if you have many items, and the *common* case is
that you need just one lock, is actually to only take that single lock
for the common case. No top-level lock at all.
Then, for the complex (but unlikely) case, you take a *separate*
top-level lock, and then you take the lower-level locks one by one,
while testing first if you already hold them (using a separate data
structure that is protected by the top-level lock).
This way, the common case only needs that single lock that protects
just that particular data structure.
That said, judging by your numbers, your read-write lock seems to work
fine too, even though I'd worry about cacheline ping-pong (but not
contention) on the readers. So it doesn't seem optimal, but it sure as
hell seems better than what we do now ;)
Linus
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