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* rt hash table / rt hash locks question
@ 2010-06-16 10:46 Nick Piggin
  2010-06-16 12:27 ` Eric Dumazet
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 3+ messages in thread
From: Nick Piggin @ 2010-06-16 10:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: netdev

I'm just converting this scalable dentry/inode hash table to a more
compact form. I was previously using a dumb spinlock per bucket,
but this doubles the size of the tables so isn't production quality.

What I've done at the moment is to use a bit_spinlock in bit 0 of each
list pointer of the table. Bit spinlocks are now pretty nice because
we can do __bit_spin_unlock() which gives non-atomic store with release
ordering, so it should be almost as fast as spinlock.

But I look at rt hash and it seems you use a small hash on the side
for spinlocks. So I wonder, pros for each:

- bitlocks have effectively zero storage
- bitlocks hit the same cacheline that the hash walk hits.
- in RCU list, locked hash walks usually followed by hash modification,
  bitlock should have brought in the line for exclusive.
- bitlock number of locks scales with hash size
- spinlocks may be slightly better at the cacheline level (bitops
  sometimes require explicit load which may not acquire exclusive
  line on some archs). On x86 ll/sc architectures, this shouldn't
  be a problem.
- spinlocks better debugging (could be overcome with a LOCKDEP
  option to revert to spinlocks, but a bit ugly).
- in practice, contention due to aliasing in buckets to lock mapping
  is probably fairly minor.

Net code is obviously tested and tuned well, but instinctively I would
have tought bitlocks are the better way to go. Any comments on this?

Thanks,
Nick


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2010-06-16 10:46 rt hash table / rt hash locks question Nick Piggin
2010-06-16 12:27 ` Eric Dumazet
2010-06-16 12:49   ` Nick Piggin

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