Re: [Lse-tech] Re: RFC: patch to allow lock-free traversal of lists with insertion

BALBIR SINGH
2001-10-10T06:00:48Z

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Linus Torvalds wrote:

>On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, BALBIR SINGH wrote:
>
>>>And THAT is the hard part. Doing lookup without locks ends up being
>>>pretty much worthless, because you need the locks for the removal
>>>anyway, at which point the whole thing looks pretty moot.
>>>
>>What about cases like the pci device list or any other such list. Sometimes
>>you do not care if somebody added something, while you were looking through
>>the list as long as you do not get illegal addresses or data.
>>Wouldn't this be very useful there? Most of these lists come up
>>at system startup and change rearly, but we look through them often.
>>
>
>It's not about "change rarely". You cannot use a non-locking lookup if
>they _ever_ remove anything.
>
>I can't think of many lists like that. The PCI lists certainly are both
>add/remove: cardbus bridges and hotplug-PCI means that they are not just
>purely "enumerate at bootup".
>

I agree, I just thought of one case quickly. Assume that somebody did a cat /proc/pci.
Meanwhile somebody is adding a new pci device (hotplug PCI) simultaneously (which is very rare).
I would not care if the new device showed up in the output of /proc/pci this time. It would
definitely show up next time. Meanwhile locking the list (just in case it changes) is an
overhead in the case above. I was referring to these cases in my earlier mail.

>
>Sure, maybe there are _some_ things that don't need to ever be removed,
>but I can't think of any interesting data structure off-hand. Truly static
>stuff tends to be allocated in an array that is sized once - array lookups
>are much faster than traversing a linked list anyway.
>
>So the linked list approach tends to make sense for things that _aren't_
>just static, but I don't know of anything that only grows and grows. In
>fact, that would sound like a horrible memory leak to me if we had
>something like that. Even slow growth is bad if you want up-times measured
>in years.
>
>Now, in all fairness I can imagine hacky lock-less removals too. To get
>them to work, you have to (a) change the "next" pointer to point to the
>next->next (and have some serialization between removals, but removals
>only, to make sure you don't have next->next also going away from you) and
>(b) leave the old "next" pointer (and thus the data structure) around
>until you can _prove_ that nobody is looking anything up any more, and
>that the now-defunct data structure can truly be removed.
>
The problem with removals is that somebody could be adding an element simulataneously
to the "next" element. Which might cause problems. I hope I correctly understood
the scenario here.

>
>However, apart from locking, there aren't all that many ways to "prove"
>that non-use. You could probably do it with interesting atomic sequence
>numbers etc, although by the time you generate atomic sequence numbers
>your lookup is already getting heavier - to the point where locking
>probably isn't so bad an idea any more.
>
> Linus
>
>
Balbir

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