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From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <bh40@calva.net>
To: Paul.Mackerras@cs.anu.edu.au, linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org,
	kbhend@business.wm.edu
Subject: Re: PPC Kernel Gurus Help?
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 15:37:26 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <19990414153726.018323@mail.mipsys.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <199904120448.OAA20256@tango.anu.edu.au>


On Mon, Apr 12, 1999, Paul Mackerras <paulus@cs.anu.edu.au> wrote:

> >I hope Apple's implementation is just overkill.  The linuxthreads
>> >pt-machine.h file in both glibc 1.99 and glibc 2.1 do not have the extra
>> >isyncs (they just use sync both before and after the routine).  They also
>> >do not align things to cache boundaries.  To do that we would have to
>> >change the sem_t because both the spinlock and the semaphore value are
>> >side by side and both are accessed this way meaning that sem_t would have
>> >to be 32 byte aligned and take up 64 bytes to be safe (32 for the
>> >semaphore and 32 for the spinlock).
>
>Does it use lwarx/stwcx. to access both the spinlock and the
>semaphore?  If so that could possibly cause a problem if they are in
>the same cache line (strictly, "reservation granule").

Don't care about what I said, I was just plain wrong (still having
trouble with PPC assembly...). Apple's implementation doesn't watch for
32 byte alignement but for 4 byte alignement, which is a lot more
understandable.

If I understand things correctly, however, there is still a potential
problem in MP, if two atomics are in the same granule, and two processors
are trying to use them at the same time. I beleive we should make sure
the kernel's atomic type takes a whole granule (cache line).

-- 
           E-Mail: <mailto:bh40@calva.net>
BenH.      Web   : <http://calvaweb.calvacom.fr/bh40/>





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  parent reply	other threads:[~1999-04-14 13:37 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
1999-04-11 18:15 PPC Kernel Gurus Help? Kevin B. Hendricks
1999-04-12  4:48 ` Paul Mackerras
1999-04-12 18:41   ` Crashing My PowerbookG3-Series when writing to the serial port Alexander Derbes
1999-04-14 13:37   ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1999-04-12 20:49 PPC Kernel Gurus Help? Edward Swarthout
     [not found] <370E71B0.577788B0@synxis.com>
     [not found] ` <19990411150328.032219@mail.mipsys.com>
1999-04-11 15:07   ` Kevin B. Hendricks
1999-04-12  4:38     ` Paul Mackerras

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