Pointer packing is now disabled by default for x86_64 targets.
Jeffrey M. Birnbaum <jmbny.@...> told me that according to his
discussions with Intel engineers, Haswell will be bumping up
VMA bits to 56 bits from 48.
If you control the hardware that CK is deployed to and don't
envision a migration to 48-bits anytime soon, then you may
enable old behavior (resulting in significant memory savings
for some data structures, namely ck_ht) by passing the
--enable-pointer-packing flag to configure.
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.