Re: Robust futexes

From: Darren Hart
Date: Fri Feb 17 2006 - 11:21:40 EST


Rusty Russell wrote:
Hi Ingo, all,

Noticed (via LWN, hence the delay) your robust futex work. Have you
considered the less-perfect, but simpler option of simply having futex
calls which tell the kernel that the u32 value is in fact the holder's
TID?

In this case, you don't get perfect robustness when TID wrap occurs:
the kernel won't know that the lock holder is dead. However, it's
simple, and telling the kernel that the lock is the tid allows the
kernel to do prio inheritence etc. in future.

Priority Inheritance has come up a couple of times in relation to Ingo's new LightWeight Robust Futexes. Ingo has said that PI is orthogonal to LWRF, but I don't think we've heard if there are plans already in the works (or in his head :-) for PI. Rusty's comment above reads as "the current LWRF implementation cannot support PI" - is there something about it that makes PI impractical to implement?

Thanks,

--
Darren Hart
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/