Re: [RFC patch] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory barrier (v9)

[Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 04:23:21PM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> * Chris Friesen (cfriesen@nortel.com) wrote:
> > On 02/12/2010 04:46 PM, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> > 
> > > Editorial question: 
> > > 
> > > This synchronization only takes care of threads using the current process memory
> > > map. It should not be used to synchronize accesses performed on memory maps
> > > shared between different processes. Is that a limitation we can live with ?
> > 
> > It makes sense for an initial version.  It would be unfortunate if this
> > were a permanent limitation, since using separate processes with
> > explicit shared memory is a useful way to mitigate memory trampler issues.
> > 
> > If we were going to allow that, it might make sense to add an address
> > range such that only those processes which have mapped that range would
> > execute the barrier.  Come to think of it, it might be possible to use
> > this somehow to avoid having to execute the barrier on *all* threads
> > within a process.
> 
> The extensible system call mandatory and optional flags will allow this kind of
> improvement later on if this appears to be needed. It will also allow user-space
> to detect if later kernels support these new features or not. But meanwhile I
> think it's good to start with this implementation that covers 99.99% of
> use-cases I can currently think of (ok, well, maybe I'm just unimaginative) ;)

It's a good point, I think having at least the ability to do
process-shared or process-private in the first version of the API might
be a good idea. That matches glibc's synchronisation routines so it
would probably be a desirable feature even if you don't implement it in
your library initially.

When writing multiprocessor scalable software, threads should often be
avoided. They share so much state that it is easy to run into
scalability issues in the kernel. So yes it would be really nice to
have userspace RCU available in a process-shared mode.