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Diffstat (limited to 'include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h')
| -rw-r--r-- | include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h | 29 |
1 files changed, 29 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h b/include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h index d74b13825501..995513fa2690 100644 --- a/include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h +++ b/include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h @@ -2,6 +2,35 @@ /* * Queued spinlock * + * A 'generic' spinlock implementation that is based on MCS locks. For an + * architecture that's looking for a 'generic' spinlock, please first consider + * ticket-lock.h and only come looking here when you've considered all the + * constraints below and can show your hardware does actually perform better + * with qspinlock. + * + * qspinlock relies on atomic_*_release()/atomic_*_acquire() to be RCsc (or no + * weaker than RCtso if you're power), where regular code only expects atomic_t + * to be RCpc. + * + * qspinlock relies on a far greater (compared to asm-generic/spinlock.h) set + * of atomic operations to behave well together, please audit them carefully to + * ensure they all have forward progress. Many atomic operations may default to + * cmpxchg() loops which will not have good forward progress properties on + * LL/SC architectures. + * + * One notable example is atomic_fetch_or_acquire(), which x86 cannot (cheaply) + * do. Carefully read the patches that introduced + * queued_fetch_set_pending_acquire(). + * + * qspinlock also heavily relies on mixed size atomic operations, in specific + * it requires architectures to have xchg16; something which many LL/SC + * architectures need to implement as a 32bit and+or in order to satisfy the + * forward progress guarantees mentioned above. + * + * Further reading on mixed size atomics that might be relevant: + * + * http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/popl17/mixed-size.pdf + * * (C) Copyright 2013-2015 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. * (C) Copyright 2015 Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Development LP * |