Re: [Patch] shm bug introduced with pagecache in 2.3.11

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Fri, 19 Nov 1999 12:29:03 -0800 (PST)


On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Alexander Viro wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> > Is anybody willing to take a stab at creating a read-write semaphore?
>
> Do you want readers' and writers' waitqueues share the spinlock?

I would go for something very similar to the current semaphore
implementation - one global spinlock for all rw-semaphores, and only if
that actually becomes a real contention point do we try to be more clever
(starting with moving it to a per-semaphore thing, and only as a last
thing doing separate wait-queues with separate spinlocks).

I doubt you'll get much contention. The current semaphores get very little
contention - the test-case that triggered this discussion in the first
place is probably the worst one by far, and that test-case will have no
contention at all with the read-write version because 99% of everything is
just readers.

The holy grail is "Make it as simple as possible. And no simpler"

Linus

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