On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 12:43:02PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> - switch all current semaphore users that don't need counting semaphores
> over to use a mutex_t type. For now it can map to struct semaphore.
> - rip out all existing complicated struct semaphore implementations and
> replace it with a portable C implementation. There's not a lot of users
> anyway. Add a mutex_t implementation that allows sensible assembly hooks
> for architectures instead of reimplementing all of it
> - add more features to mutex_t where nessecary
Oh dear, this is going to take a while. In any case, here is such a
first step in creating such a sequence of patches. Located at
http://www.kvack.org/~bcrl/patches/mutex-A0/ are the following patches:
00_mutex.diff - Introduces the basic mutex abstraction on top
of the existing semaphore implementation.
01_i_sem.diff - Converts all users of i_sem to use the mutex
abstraction.
10_new_mutex.diff - Replaces the semphore mutex with a new mutex
derrived from Trond's iosem patch. Note that
this fixes a serious bug in iosems: see the
change in mutex_lock_wake_function that ignores
the return value of default_wake_function, as
on SMP a process might still be running while
we actually made progress.
sem-test.c - A basic stress tester for the mutex / semaphore.
I'm still not convinced that introducing the mutex type is the best
approach, especially given the history of the up()/down() implementation.
On the aio side of things, I introduced the owner field in the mutex (as
opposed to the flag in Trond's iosem) for the next patch in the series to
enable something like the following api:
int aio_lock_mutex(struct mutex *lock, struct iocb *iocb);
...generic_file_read....
{
ret = mutex_lock_aio(&inode->i_sem, iocb);
if (ret)
return ret; /* aio_lock_mutex can return -EIOCBQUEUED */
...
mutex_unlock(&inode->i_sem);
}
mutex_lock_aio will attempt to take the lock if the iocb is not the owner,
otherwise it returns immediately (ie ->owner == iocb). This will allow for
code paths that support aio to follow a fairly similar coding style to the
synchronous io path.
More next week...
-ben
--
"Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once." -- John Wheeler
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