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Tip revision: d770e558e21961ad6cfdf0ff7df0eb5d7d4f0754 authored by Linus Torvalds on 05 July 2015, 18:01:52 UTC
Linux 4.2-rc1
Tip revision: d770e55
percpu-rw-semaphore.txt
Percpu rw semaphores
--------------------

Percpu rw semaphores is a new read-write semaphore design that is
optimized for locking for reading.

The problem with traditional read-write semaphores is that when multiple
cores take the lock for reading, the cache line containing the semaphore
is bouncing between L1 caches of the cores, causing performance
degradation.

Locking for reading is very fast, it uses RCU and it avoids any atomic
instruction in the lock and unlock path. On the other hand, locking for
writing is very expensive, it calls synchronize_rcu() that can take
hundreds of milliseconds.

The lock is declared with "struct percpu_rw_semaphore" type.
The lock is initialized percpu_init_rwsem, it returns 0 on success and
-ENOMEM on allocation failure.
The lock must be freed with percpu_free_rwsem to avoid memory leak.

The lock is locked for read with percpu_down_read, percpu_up_read and
for write with percpu_down_write, percpu_up_write.

The idea of using RCU for optimized rw-lock was introduced by
Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>.
The code was written by Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
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