Re: [PATCH RFC 0/2] Lockless update of reference count protected by spinlock

[Waiman Long <waiman.long@hp.com>]

On 06/19/2013 12:50 PM, Waiman Long wrote:
> This patchset supports a generic mechanism to atomically update
> a reference count that is protected by a spinlock without actually
> acquiring the lock itself. If the update doesn't succeeed, the caller
> will have to acquire the lock and update the reference count in the
> the old way.  This will help in situation where there is a lot of
> spinlock contention because of frequent reference count update.
>
> The new mechanism was designed in such a way to easily retrofit
> into existing code with minimal changes. Both the spinlock and the
> reference count can be accessed in the same way as before.
>
> The d_lock and d_count fields of the struct dentry in dcache.h was
> modified to use the new mechanism. This serves as an example of how
> to convert existing spinlock and reference count combo to use the
> new way of locklessly updating the reference count.
>
> Signed-off-by: Waiman Long<Waiman.Long@hp.com>
>
> Waiman Long (2):
>    spinlock: New spinlock_refcount.h for lockless update of refcount
>    dcache: Locklessly update d_count whenever possible
>
>   fs/dcache.c                       |   14 +++-
>   include/linux/dcache.h            |   22 +++++-
>   include/linux/spinlock_refcount.h |  145 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>   include/linux/spinlock_types.h    |   19 +++++
>   4 files changed, 196 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>   create mode 100644 include/linux/spinlock_refcount.h
>

So far, I haven't received any feedback on this patch. I would really 
appreciate if someone could let me know if there is any improvement that 
will make this patch more merge-able.

Thanks,
Longman