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authorDavidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com>2014-07-30 13:41:55 -0700
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2014-08-13 10:32:03 +0200
commit214e0aed639ef40987bf6159fad303171a6de31e (patch)
tree9f4c2eb1497a7377de93d619c05cf6c82fcfa0cb /Documentation/locking/rt-mutex.txt
parent7608a43d8f2e02f8b532f8e11481d7ecf8b5d3f9 (diff)
locking/Documentation: Move locking related docs into Documentation/locking/
Specifically: Documentation/locking/lockdep-design.txt Documentation/locking/lockstat.txt Documentation/locking/mutex-design.txt Documentation/locking/rt-mutex-design.txt Documentation/locking/rt-mutex.txt Documentation/locking/spinlocks.txt Documentation/locking/ww-mutex-design.txt Signed-off-by: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: jason.low2@hp.com Cc: aswin@hp.com Cc: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@plumgrid.com> Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> Cc: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@ieee.org> Cc: David Airlie <airlied@linux.ie> Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> Cc: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com> Cc: Josef Bacik <jbacik@fusionio.com> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Lubomir Rintel <lkundrak@v3.sk> Cc: Masanari Iida <standby24x7@gmail.com> Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org> Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> Cc: Vineet Gupta <vgupta@synopsys.com> Cc: fengguang.wu@intel.com Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1406752916-3341-6-git-send-email-davidlohr@hp.com Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
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+RT-mutex subsystem with PI support
+----------------------------------
+
+RT-mutexes with priority inheritance are used to support PI-futexes,
+which enable pthread_mutex_t priority inheritance attributes
+(PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT). [See Documentation/pi-futex.txt for more details
+about PI-futexes.]
+
+This technology was developed in the -rt tree and streamlined for
+pthread_mutex support.
+
+Basic principles:
+-----------------
+
+RT-mutexes extend the semantics of simple mutexes by the priority
+inheritance protocol.
+
+A low priority owner of a rt-mutex inherits the priority of a higher
+priority waiter until the rt-mutex is released. If the temporarily
+boosted owner blocks on a rt-mutex itself it propagates the priority
+boosting to the owner of the other rt_mutex it gets blocked on. The
+priority boosting is immediately removed once the rt_mutex has been
+unlocked.
+
+This approach allows us to shorten the block of high-prio tasks on
+mutexes which protect shared resources. Priority inheritance is not a
+magic bullet for poorly designed applications, but it allows
+well-designed applications to use userspace locks in critical parts of
+an high priority thread, without losing determinism.
+
+The enqueueing of the waiters into the rtmutex waiter list is done in
+priority order. For same priorities FIFO order is chosen. For each
+rtmutex, only the top priority waiter is enqueued into the owner's
+priority waiters list. This list too queues in priority order. Whenever
+the top priority waiter of a task changes (for example it timed out or
+got a signal), the priority of the owner task is readjusted. [The
+priority enqueueing is handled by "plists", see include/linux/plist.h
+for more details.]
+
+RT-mutexes are optimized for fastpath operations and have no internal
+locking overhead when locking an uncontended mutex or unlocking a mutex
+without waiters. The optimized fastpath operations require cmpxchg
+support. [If that is not available then the rt-mutex internal spinlock
+is used]
+
+The state of the rt-mutex is tracked via the owner field of the rt-mutex
+structure:
+
+rt_mutex->owner holds the task_struct pointer of the owner. Bit 0 and 1
+are used to keep track of the "owner is pending" and "rtmutex has
+waiters" state.
+
+ owner bit1 bit0
+ NULL 0 0 mutex is free (fast acquire possible)
+ NULL 0 1 invalid state
+ NULL 1 0 Transitional state*
+ NULL 1 1 invalid state
+ taskpointer 0 0 mutex is held (fast release possible)
+ taskpointer 0 1 task is pending owner
+ taskpointer 1 0 mutex is held and has waiters
+ taskpointer 1 1 task is pending owner and mutex has waiters
+
+Pending-ownership handling is a performance optimization:
+pending-ownership is assigned to the first (highest priority) waiter of
+the mutex, when the mutex is released. The thread is woken up and once
+it starts executing it can acquire the mutex. Until the mutex is taken
+by it (bit 0 is cleared) a competing higher priority thread can "steal"
+the mutex which puts the woken up thread back on the waiters list.
+
+The pending-ownership optimization is especially important for the
+uninterrupted workflow of high-prio tasks which repeatedly
+takes/releases locks that have lower-prio waiters. Without this
+optimization the higher-prio thread would ping-pong to the lower-prio
+task [because at unlock time we always assign a new owner].
+
+(*) The "mutex has waiters" bit gets set to take the lock. If the lock
+doesn't already have an owner, this bit is quickly cleared if there are
+no waiters. So this is a transitional state to synchronize with looking
+at the owner field of the mutex and the mutex owner releasing the lock.