Re: semaphore and mutex in current Linux kernel (3.2.2)

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Chen, Dennis (SRDC SW) <Dennis1.Chen@amd.com> wrote:

> Documentation/mutex-design.txt:
> 
> "- 'struct mutex' is smaller on most architectures: E.g. on x86,
>    'struct semaphore' is 20 bytes, 'struct mutex' is 16 bytes.
>    A smaller structure size means less RAM footprint, and better
>    CPU-cache utilization."
> ================================================================
>
> Now in my x86-64 32-bit Linux environment, 'struct semaphone' 
> is 16 bytes, 'struct mutex' is 20 bytes. So seems the RAM 
> footprint advantages are not there...

It got larger due to the adaptive spin-mutex performance 
optimization.

> For the performance advantages followed, I don't have the 
> ./test-mutex and maybe the testing environment, so haven't the 
> 1st hand data for this item...

Well, a way to reproduce that would be to find a lock_mutex 
intense workload ('perf top -g', etc.), and then changing back 
the underlying mutex to a semaphore, and measure the performance 
of the two primitives.

Thanks,

	Ingo