Re: [patch 1/3] mutex subsystem: trylock

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Thu Dec 29 2005 - 03:33:12 EST



* Nicolas Pitre <nico@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> > > > + * 1) if the exclusive store fails we fail, and
> > > > + *
> > > > + * 2) if the decremented value is not zero we don't even attempt the store.
> > >
> > >
> > > btw I really think that 1) is wrong. trylock should do everything it
> > > can to get the semaphore short of sleeping. Just because some
> > > cacheline got written to (which might even be shared!) in the middle
> > > of the atomic op is not a good enough reason to fail the trylock imho.
> > > Going into the slowpath.. fine. But here it's a quality of
> > > implementation issue; you COULD get the semaphore without sleeping (at
> > > least probably, you'd have to retry to know for sure) but because
> > > something wrote to the same cacheline as the lock... no. that's just
> > > not good enough.. sorry.
> >
> > point. I solved this in my tree by calling the generic trylock <fn> if
> > there's an __ex_flag failure in the ARMv6 case. Should be rare (and thus
> > the call is under unlikely()), and should thus still enable the fast
> > implementation.
>
> I'd solve it like this instead (on top of your latest patches):

thanks, applied.

> + "1: ldrex %0, [%3] \n"
> + "subs %1, %0, #1 \n"
> + "strexeq %2, %1, [%3] \n"
> + "movlt %0, #0 \n"
> + "cmpeq %2, #0 \n"
> + "bgt 1b \n"

so we are back to what is in essence a cmpxchg implementation?

Ingo
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