John Wittrock has contributed a phase-fair reader-writer
lock implementation. These locks allow phase fairness
guarantees between readers and writers. This work includes
additional changes and clean-up.
Follow-up work is expected.
Thanks to John Wittrock for patches and Professor Gabriel
Parmer (http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~gparmer/) for advising.
Upon popular request, added a variant of the ticket spinlock
with trylock support. This is pending additional verification
on other architectures besides x86*. It is still unclear whether
this implementation will be the default as it is has slower
fast path.
Add trylock support to the ck_spinlock validation tests.
It currently only tests ck_spinlock_ticket_t trylock
functionality if available.
CK_LIST_INSERT_HEAD was incorrectly managing prev
pointer on insertion to non-empty list. This bug
would cause erroneous behavior on CK_LIST_REMOVE
to non-head elements. Unit test will be updated
for this regression.
An off-by-one was introduced in downgrade path from writer.
This can cause deadlock if a writer downgrades from a write lock.
Pointed out by Jeffrey Birnbaum <jmb...@...>.
Both LLVM-backed compilers and GCC incorrectly treat
a barrier-sandwiched load as a loop invariant in dequeue_spmc.
Forcing volatile atomic load semantics generates the right
thing.
Thanks to Devon O'Dell and Abel Mathew for help in catching
this issue.
The distinction between additive/exponential implementation
and geometric implementation does little but confuse users.
The terminology used in ck_backoff now reflects terminology
used in literature.
ck_backoff_gb has been removed.
This operation is of format:
CK_S*LIST_MOVE(a, b, linkage) and is equivalent to intializing
a with the contents of b. This is done in a manner that is atomic
with respect to readers. Read-only operations are still valid in
b, but behavior is undefined for write-side operations on b after
a MOVE operation.
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.
Some people might be confused as far as lack of
fencing in the lock. Add a comment to clarify that
old values should not be equal to new values
of current position (where acquiring the current position
already has a global ordering).
As ck_pr semantics were still not molded, I was designing
under the assumption I would potentially go towards
acq/req interface. Since RMO will be the semantic norm for
the ck_pr model from now on, enforce stricter ordering
requirements on rwlock.
ck_rwlock_write_unlock function will now also serialize both
loads and stores.
I was actually unsure of the exact memory model
I wanted for atomic RMW operations. It was
made apparent with time that I had to adopt RMO
if I didn't want to sacrifice performance. Make
sure we can assume RMO for the stack.
Samy Al Bahra
Samy Al Bahra
Joao Fernandes
Abel Mathew