Re: ll/sc emulation patch

[Mike McDonald <mikemac@mikemac.com>]

>Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 14:03:30 +0200 (MET DST)
>From: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl>
>To: Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>
>Subject: Re: ll/sc emulation patch
>
>On Sat, 14 Jul 2001, Ralf Baechle wrote:
>
>> I'm just making an attempt to re-implement the ll/sc emulation as light
>> as possible.  I hope to get the overhead down to the point were we don't
>> need _test_and_set anymore - in any case below the overhead of a syscall.
>> 
>> Have you ever profiled the number of calls to MIPS_ATOMIC_SET or
>> _test_and_set?  They'll be the other factor in a decission.
>
> I didn't profile it very extensively, yet when stracing `ls /usr/lib'
>(fileutils 4.1 linked against glibc 2.2.3) on my system once I yielded
>~4500 syscalls of which ~4000 were _test_and_set() (or MIPS_ATOMIC_SET,
>depending on my kernel/glibc configuration) invocations.  Yes, libpthread
>appears to assume atomic operations are cheap, which is justifiable as
>they are indeed, for almost every other CPU type. 

  Not knowing anything about the glibc architecture, I have a dumb
question: why is 'ls' doing anything at all with pthreads?

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@mikemac.com