Re: [PATCH 04/10] AXFS: axfs_inode.c

Arnd Bergmann
2008-08-21T15:14:35Z

On Thursday 21 August 2008, Jared Hulbert wrote:
> > Have you seen any benefit of the rwsem over a simple mutex? I would guess
> > that you can never even get into the situation where you get concurrent
> > readers since I haven't found a single down_read() in your code, only
> > downgrade_write()
>
> We implemented a rwsem here because you can get concurrent readers.
> My understanding is that downgrade_write() puts the rewem into the
> same state as down_read().  Am I mistaken?

Your interpretation of downgrade_write is correct, but if every thread
always does

down_write();
serialized_code();
downgrade_write();
parallel_code();
up_read();

Then you still won't have any concurrency, because each thread trying
to down_write() will be blocked until the previous one has done its up_read(),
causing parallel_code() to be serialized as well.

In addition to that, I'd still consider it better to use a simple mutex
if parallel_code() is a much faster operation than serialized_code(), as it
is in your case, where only the memcpy is parallel and that is much slower
than the deflate.