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diff --git a/Documentation/locking/lglock.txt b/Documentation/locking/lglock.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a6971e34fabe..000000000000 --- a/Documentation/locking/lglock.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,166 +0,0 @@ -lglock - local/global locks for mostly local access patterns ------------------------------------------------------------- - -Origin: Nick Piggin's VFS scalability series introduced during - 2.6.35++ [1] [2] -Location: kernel/locking/lglock.c - include/linux/lglock.h -Users: currently only the VFS and stop_machine related code - -Design Goal: ------------- - -Improve scalability of globally used large data sets that are -distributed over all CPUs as per_cpu elements. - -To manage global data structures that are partitioned over all CPUs -as per_cpu elements but can be mostly handled by CPU local actions -lglock will be used where the majority of accesses are cpu local -reading and occasional cpu local writing with very infrequent -global write access. - - -* deal with things locally whenever possible - - very fast access to the local per_cpu data - - reasonably fast access to specific per_cpu data on a different - CPU -* while making global action possible when needed - - by expensive access to all CPUs locks - effectively - resulting in a globally visible critical section. - -Design: -------- - -Basically it is an array of per_cpu spinlocks with the -lg_local_lock/unlock accessing the local CPUs lock object and the -lg_local_lock_cpu/unlock_cpu accessing a remote CPUs lock object -the lg_local_lock has to disable preemption as migration protection so -that the reference to the local CPUs lock does not go out of scope. -Due to the lg_local_lock/unlock only touching cpu-local resources it -is fast. Taking the local lock on a different CPU will be more -expensive but still relatively cheap. - -One can relax the migration constraints by acquiring the current -CPUs lock with lg_local_lock_cpu, remember the cpu, and release that -lock at the end of the critical section even if migrated. This should -give most of the performance benefits without inhibiting migration -though needs careful considerations for nesting of lglocks and -consideration of deadlocks with lg_global_lock. - -The lg_global_lock/unlock locks all underlying spinlocks of all -possible CPUs (including those off-line). The preemption disable/enable -are needed in the non-RT kernels to prevent deadlocks like: - - on cpu 1 - - task A task B - lg_global_lock - got cpu 0 lock - <<<< preempt <<<< - lg_local_lock_cpu for cpu 0 - spin on cpu 0 lock - -On -RT this deadlock scenario is resolved by the arch_spin_locks in the -lglocks being replaced by rt_mutexes which resolve the above deadlock -by boosting the lock-holder. - - -Implementation: ---------------- - -The initial lglock implementation from Nick Piggin used some complex -macros to generate the lglock/brlock in lglock.h - they were later -turned into a set of functions by Andi Kleen [7]. The change to functions -was motivated by the presence of multiple lock users and also by them -being easier to maintain than the generating macros. This change to -functions is also the basis to eliminated the restriction of not -being initializeable in kernel modules (the remaining problem is that -locks are not explicitly initialized - see lockdep-design.txt) - -Declaration and initialization: -------------------------------- - - #include <linux/lglock.h> - - DEFINE_LGLOCK(name) - or: - DEFINE_STATIC_LGLOCK(name); - - lg_lock_init(&name, "lockdep_name_string"); - - on UP this is mapped to DEFINE_SPINLOCK(name) in both cases, note - also that as of 3.18-rc6 all declaration in use are of the _STATIC_ - variant (and it seems that the non-static was never in use). - lg_lock_init is initializing the lockdep map only. - -Usage: ------- - -From the locking semantics it is a spinlock. It could be called a -locality aware spinlock. lg_local_* behaves like a per_cpu -spinlock and lg_global_* like a global spinlock. -No surprises in the API. - - lg_local_lock(*lglock); - access to protected per_cpu object on this CPU - lg_local_unlock(*lglock); - - lg_local_lock_cpu(*lglock, cpu); - access to protected per_cpu object on other CPU cpu - lg_local_unlock_cpu(*lglock, cpu); - - lg_global_lock(*lglock); - access all protected per_cpu objects on all CPUs - lg_global_unlock(*lglock); - - There are no _trylock variants of the lglocks. - -Note that the lg_global_lock/unlock has to iterate over all possible -CPUs rather than the actually present CPUs or a CPU could go off-line -with a held lock [4] and that makes it very expensive. A discussion on -these issues can be found at [5] - -Constraints: ------------- - - * currently the declaration of lglocks in kernel modules is not - possible, though this should be doable with little change. - * lglocks are not recursive. - * suitable for code that can do most operations on the CPU local - data and will very rarely need the global lock - * lg_global_lock/unlock is *very* expensive and does not scale - * on UP systems all lg_* primitives are simply spinlocks - * in PREEMPT_RT the spinlock becomes an rt-mutex and can sleep but - does not change the tasks state while sleeping [6]. - * in PREEMPT_RT the preempt_disable/enable in lg_local_lock/unlock - is downgraded to a migrate_disable/enable, the other - preempt_disable/enable are downgraded to barriers [6]. - The deadlock noted for non-RT above is resolved due to rt_mutexes - boosting the lock-holder in this case which arch_spin_locks do - not do. - -lglocks were designed for very specific problems in the VFS and probably -only are the right answer in these corner cases. Any new user that looks -at lglocks probably wants to look at the seqlock and RCU alternatives as -her first choice. There are also efforts to resolve the RCU issues that -currently prevent using RCU in place of view remaining lglocks. - -Note on brlock history: ------------------------ - -The 'Big Reader' read-write spinlocks were originally introduced by -Ingo Molnar in 2000 (2.4/2.5 kernel series) and removed in 2003. They -later were introduced by the VFS scalability patch set in 2.6 series -again as the "big reader lock" brlock [2] variant of lglock which has -been replaced by seqlock primitives or by RCU based primitives in the -3.13 kernel series as was suggested in [3] in 2003. The brlock was -entirely removed in the 3.13 kernel series. - -Link: 1 http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/2/81 -Link: 2 http://lwn.net/Articles/401738/ -Link: 3 http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/3/9/205 -Link: 4 https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/8/24/185 -Link: 5 http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/12/18/189 -Link: 6 https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/rt/ - patch series - lglocks-rt.patch.patch -Link: 7 http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/5/26 |