I had the pleasure of spending a significant amount of time at the most
recent LPC with Mathieu Desnoyers and Paul McKenney. In discussing
RCU semantics in relation to epoch reclamation, it was argued that
epoch reclamation is a specialisation of RCU (rather than a generalization).
In light of this discussion, I thought it would make more sense to not expose
write-side synchronization semantics aside from ck_epoch_call (similar to
RCU call), ck_epoch_poll (identical to tick), ck_epoch_barrier and
ck_epoch_synchronization (similar to ck_epoch_synchronization). Writers will
now longer have to use write-side epoch sections but can instead rely on
epoch_barrier/synchronization for blocking semantics and ck_epoch_poll
for old tick semantics.
One advantage of this is we can avoid write-side recursion for certain workloads.
Additionally, for infrequent writes, epoch_barrier and epoch_synchronization both
allow for blocking semantics to be used so you don't have to pay the cost of
epoch_entry for non-blocking dispatch.
Example usage:
e = stack_pop(mystack);
ck_epoch_synchronize(...);
free(e);
read_begin and read_end has been replaced with ck_epoch_begin and ck_epoch_end.
If multiple writers need SMR guarantees, then they can also use ck_epoch_begin
and ck_epoch_end. Any dispatch in presence of multiple writers should be done
with-in an epoch section (for now).
There are some follow-up commits to come.
Though a new implementation is in the works, roll in
some performance improvements in the mean time.
The probe routines have been broken out into separate
reader/writer variants. These variants are much less
branch-intensive (and don't involve predict to stall
in many cases).
New implementation is attempting to deal with
interface-induced overheads.
Documentation and regressions tests have been updated to reflect this.
This functionality allows for individual hash tables use to different
allocation functions. Thanks to Wez Furlong for pointing out the necessary
documentation update for ck_ht.
Specifically, any platform that has CK support for 64-bit
load/store operations.
Additional improvements have been made to the unit tests
to disambiguate put/get failures.
This is a hash table that is optimized for architectures that
implement total store ordering and workloads that are read-heavy
involving a single writer and multiple readers. Unlike traditional
non-blocking multi-producer/multi-consumer hash table
implementations this version allows for immediate re-use of deleted
buckets (no need for explicit reclamation cycles) and is more
conducive to traditional safe memory reclamation schemes used in
unmanaged languages (otherwise, we would require key duplication).
It is relatively heavy-weight for MPMC workloads on architectures
which do not implement TSO in comparison to Click's MPMC hash
table. However, it still has better performance characteristics
than a blocking hash table.
The committed version currently only provides x86_64 support. This is
being committed for review by peers and for a silent release that will
allow us to test ck_ht_spmc under high production workloads.
Next public release will include additional documentation as well as
support for other architectures.
In the mean time, please see the unit tests for example usage. Included in
this commit: Dropped -Wbad-function-cast from GCC port.
Samy Al Bahra
Samy Al Bahra