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authorMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>2020-05-01 17:37:54 +0200
committerJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>2020-05-15 12:05:07 -0600
commit95ca6d73a8a97ba343082746dbf935863b76375a (patch)
tree5c7514627a4f4fa5d1b34783cf35b83354f4f2d6 /Documentation/locking/percpu-rw-semaphore.rst
parent9184027f0aaf6c95856bb57d04d0fa0b16fd9981 (diff)
docs: move locking-specific documents to locking/
Several files under Documentation/*.txt describe some type of locking API. Move them to locking/ subdir and add to the locking/index.rst index file. Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/dd833a10bbd0b2c1461d78913f5ec28a7e27f00b.1588345503.git.mchehab+huawei@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
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+====================
+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>