kernelnewbies.kernelnewbies.org archive mirror
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: xerofoify@gmail.com (nick)
To: kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org
Subject: Kernel Locking Question
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:42:02 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <5501191A.7030406@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7964.1426124930@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>



On 2015-03-11 09:48 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 19:03:33 -0400, Nicholas Krause said:
> 
>> was wondering of how this would improve file system scalability and
>> reliability if implemented in file system code for btrfs worker threads.
> 
> Step 1: Figure out what locks are contended in actual systems.
> Step 2: Determine if the scope of a contended lock can be reduced.
> Step 3: ???
> Step 4: Profit!
> 
> Note that improving scalability will often cause reliability issues,
> because as you decompose locks into sets of smaller locks, you increase
> the number of ways you can get it wrong.  The BKL, for all its uglyness,
> was pretty hard to screw up.  On the other hand, we probably would never
> have gotten rid of it if somebody hadn't put lockdep into the kernel.  It
> was painful enough even with automated testing tools....
> 
Thanks Valdis,
That makes sense to me. I was wondering however about the reader vs writer issues
in file systems too as this seems to me coming up a lot in btrfs and  other file
systems for various reasons.
Thanks Nick

      reply	other threads:[~2015-03-12  4:42 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-03-11 23:03 Kernel Locking Question Nicholas Krause
2015-03-12  1:48 ` Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
2015-03-12  4:42   ` nick [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=5501191A.7030406@gmail.com \
    --to=xerofoify@gmail.com \
    --cc=kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).