Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 7 Nov 2013 06:31:39 -0800 | From | "Paul E. McKenney" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH v3 3/5] MCS Lock: Barrier corrections |
| |
On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 04:50:23AM -0800, Michel Lespinasse wrote: > On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Linus Torvalds > <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > > > > On Nov 7, 2013 6:55 PM, "Michel Lespinasse" <walken@google.com> wrote: > >> > >> Rather than writing arch-specific locking code, would you agree to > >> introduce acquire and release memory operations ? > > > > Yes, that's probably the right thing to do. What ops do we need? Store with > > release, cmpxchg and load with acquire? Anything else? > > Depends on what lock types we want to implement on top; for MCS we would need: > - xchg acquire (common case) and load acquire (for spinning on our > locker's wait word) > - cmpxchg release (when there is no next locker) and store release > (when writing to the next locker's wait word) > > One downside of the proposal is that using a load acquire for spinning > puts the memory barrier within the spin loop. So this model is very > intuitive and does not add unnecessary barriers on x86, but it my > place the barriers in a suboptimal place for architectures that need > them.
OK, I will bite... Why is a barrier in the spinloop suboptimal?
Can't say that I have tried measuring it, but the barrier should not normally result in interconnect traffic. Given that the barrier is required anyway, it should not affect lock-acquisition latency.
So what am I missing here?
Thanx, Paul
| |