spinlocks.txt
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- On Fri, 2 Jan 1998, Doug Ledford wrote:
- >
- > I'm working on making the aic7xxx driver more SMP friendly (as well as
- > importing the latest FreeBSD sequencer code to have 7895 support) and wanted
- > to get some info from you. The goal here is to make the various routines
- > SMP safe as well as UP safe during interrupts and other manipulating
- > routines. So far, I've added a spin_lock variable to things like my queue
- > structs. Now, from what I recall, there are some spin lock functions I can
- > use to lock these spin locks from other use as opposed to a (nasty)
- > save_flags(); cli(); stuff; restore_flags(); construct. Where do I find
- > these routines and go about making use of them? Do they only lock on a
- > per-processor basis or can they also lock say an interrupt routine from
- > mucking with a queue if the queue routine was manipulating it when the
- > interrupt occurred, or should I still use a cli(); based construct on that
- > one?
- See <asm/spinlock.h>. The basic version is:
- spinlock_t xxx_lock = SPIN_LOCK_UNLOCKED;
- unsigned long flags;
- spin_lock_irqsave(&xxx_lock, flags);
- ... critical section here ..
- spin_unlock_irqrestore(&xxx_lock, flags);
- and the above is always safe. It will disable interrupts _locally_, but the
- spinlock itself will guarantee the global lock, so it will guarantee that
- there is only one thread-of-control within the region(s) protected by that
- lock.
- Note that it works well even under UP - the above sequence under UP
- essentially is just the same as doing a
- unsigned long flags;
- save_flags(flags); cli();
- ... critical section ...
- restore_flags(flags);
- so the code does _not_ need to worry about UP vs SMP issues: the spinlocks
- work correctly under both (and spinlocks are actually more efficient on
- architectures that allow doing the "save_flags + cli" in one go because I
- don't export that interface normally).
- NOTE NOTE NOTE! The reason the spinlock is so much faster than a global
- interrupt lock under SMP is exactly because it disables interrupts only on
- the local CPU. The spin-lock is safe only when you _also_ use the lock
- itself to do locking across CPU's, which implies that EVERYTHING that
- touches a shared variable has to agree about the spinlock they want to
- use.
- The above is usually pretty simple (you usually need and want only one
- spinlock for most things - using more than one spinlock can make things a
- lot more complex and even slower and is usually worth it only for
- sequences that you _know_ need to be split up: avoid it at all cost if you
- aren't sure). HOWEVER, it _does_ mean that if you have some code that does
- cli();
- .. critical section ..
- sti();
- and another sequence that does
- spin_lock_irqsave(flags);
- .. critical section ..
- spin_unlock_irqrestore(flags);
- then they are NOT mutually exclusive, and the critical regions can happen
- at the same time on two different CPU's. That's fine per se, but the
- critical regions had better be critical for different things (ie they
- can't stomp on each other).
- The above is a problem mainly if you end up mixing code - for example the
- routines in ll_rw_block() tend to use cli/sti to protect the atomicity of
- their actions, and if a driver uses spinlocks instead then you should
- think about issues like the above..
- This is really the only really hard part about spinlocks: once you start
- using spinlocks they tend to expand to areas you might not have noticed
- before, because you have to make sure the spinlocks correctly protect the
- shared data structures _everywhere_ they are used. The spinlocks are most
- easily added to places that are completely independent of other code (ie
- internal driver data structures that nobody else ever touches, for
- example).
- ----
- Lesson 2: reader-writer spinlocks.
- If your data accesses have a very natural pattern where you usually tend
- to mostly read from the shared variables, the reader-writer locks
- (rw_lock) versions of the spinlocks are often nicer. They allow multiple
- readers to be in the same critical region at once, but if somebody wants
- to change the variables it has to get an exclusive write lock. The
- routines look the same as above:
- rwlock_t xxx_lock = RW_LOCK_UNLOCKED;
- unsigned long flags;
- read_lock_irqsave(&xxx_lock, flags);
- .. critical section that only reads the info ...
- read_unlock_irqrestore(&xxx_lock, flags);
- write_lock_irqsave(&xxx_lock, flags);
- .. read and write exclusive access to the info ...
- write_unlock_irqrestore(&xxx_lock, flags);
- The above kind of lock is useful for complex data structures like linked
- lists etc, especially when you know that most of the work is to just
- traverse the list searching for entries without changing the list itself,
- for example. Then you can use the read lock for that kind of list
- traversal, which allows many concurrent readers. Anything that _changes_
- the list will have to get the write lock.
- Note: you cannot "upgrade" a read-lock to a write-lock, so if you at _any_
- time need to do any changes (even if you don't do it every time), you have
- to get the write-lock at the very beginning. I could fairly easily add a
- primitive to create a "upgradeable" read-lock, but it hasn't been an issue
- yet. Tell me if you'd want one.
- ----
- Lesson 3: spinlocks revisited.
- The single spin-lock primitives above are by no means the only ones. They
- are the most safe ones, and the ones that work under all circumstances,
- but partly _because_ they are safe they are also fairly slow. They are
- much faster than a generic global cli/sti pair, but slower than they'd
- need to be, because they do have to disable interrupts (which is just a
- single instruction on a x86, but it's an expensive one - and on other
- architectures it can be worse).
- If you have a case where you have to protect a data structure across
- several CPU's and you want to use spinlocks you can potentially use
- cheaper versions of the spinlocks. IFF you know that the spinlocks are
- never used in interrupt handlers, you can use the non-irq versions:
- spin_lock(&lock);
- ...
- spin_unlock(&lock);
- (and the equivalent read-write versions too, of course). The spinlock will
- guarantee the same kind of exclusive access, and it will be much faster.
- This is useful if you know that the data in question is only ever
- manipulated from a "process context", ie no interrupts involved.
- The reasons you mustn't use these versions if you have interrupts that
- play with the spinlock is that you can get deadlocks:
- spin_lock(&lock);
- ...
- <- interrupt comes in:
- spin_lock(&lock);
- where an interrupt tries to lock an already locked variable. This is ok if
- the other interrupt happens on another CPU, but it is _not_ ok if the
- interrupt happens on the same CPU that already holds the lock, because the
- lock will obviously never be released (because the interrupt is waiting
- for the lock, and the lock-holder is interrupted by the interrupt and will
- not continue until the interrupt has been processed).
- (This is also the reason why the irq-versions of the spinlocks only need
- to disable the _local_ interrupts - it's ok to use spinlocks in interrupts
- on other CPU's, because an interrupt on another CPU doesn't interrupt the
- CPU that holds the lock, so the lock-holder can continue and eventually
- releases the lock).
- Note that you can be clever with read-write locks and interrupts. For
- example, if you know that the interrupt only ever gets a read-lock, then
- you can use a non-irq version of read locks everywhere - because they
- don't block on each other (and thus there is no dead-lock wrt interrupts.
- But when you do the write-lock, you have to use the irq-safe version.
- For an example of being clever with rw-locks, see the "waitqueue_lock"
- handling in kernel/sched.c - nothing ever _changes_ a wait-queue from
- within an interrupt, they only read the queue in order to know whom to
- wake up. So read-locks are safe (which is good: they are very common
- indeed), while write-locks need to protect themselves against interrupts.
- Linus