diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | ipc/sem.c | 103 |
1 files changed, 53 insertions, 50 deletions
@@ -3,56 +3,6 @@ * Copyright (C) 1992 Krishna Balasubramanian * Copyright (C) 1995 Eric Schenk, Bruno Haible * - * IMPLEMENTATION NOTES ON CODE REWRITE (Eric Schenk, January 1995): - * This code underwent a massive rewrite in order to solve some problems - * with the original code. In particular the original code failed to - * wake up processes that were waiting for semval to go to 0 if the - * value went to 0 and was then incremented rapidly enough. In solving - * this problem I have also modified the implementation so that it - * processes pending operations in a FIFO manner, thus give a guarantee - * that processes waiting for a lock on the semaphore won't starve - * unless another locking process fails to unlock. - * In addition the following two changes in behavior have been introduced: - * - The original implementation of semop returned the value - * last semaphore element examined on success. This does not - * match the manual page specifications, and effectively - * allows the user to read the semaphore even if they do not - * have read permissions. The implementation now returns 0 - * on success as stated in the manual page. - * - There is some confusion over whether the set of undo adjustments - * to be performed at exit should be done in an atomic manner. - * That is, if we are attempting to decrement the semval should we queue - * up and wait until we can do so legally? - * The original implementation attempted to do this. - * The current implementation does not do so. This is because I don't - * think it is the right thing (TM) to do, and because I couldn't - * see a clean way to get the old behavior with the new design. - * The POSIX standard and SVID should be consulted to determine - * what behavior is mandated. - * - * Further notes on refinement (Christoph Rohland, December 1998): - * - The POSIX standard says, that the undo adjustments simply should - * redo. So the current implementation is o.K. - * - The previous code had two flaws: - * 1) It actively gave the semaphore to the next waiting process - * sleeping on the semaphore. Since this process did not have the - * cpu this led to many unnecessary context switches and bad - * performance. Now we only check which process should be able to - * get the semaphore and if this process wants to reduce some - * semaphore value we simply wake it up without doing the - * operation. So it has to try to get it later. Thus e.g. the - * running process may reacquire the semaphore during the current - * time slice. If it only waits for zero or increases the semaphore, - * we do the operation in advance and wake it up. - * 2) It did not wake up all zero waiting processes. We try to do - * better but only get the semops right which only wait for zero or - * increase. If there are decrement operations in the operations - * array we do the same as before. - * - * With the incarnation of O(1) scheduler, it becomes unnecessary to perform - * check/retry algorithm for waking up blocked processes as the new scheduler - * is better at handling thread switch than the old one. - * * /proc/sysvipc/sem support (c) 1999 Dragos Acostachioaie <dragos@iname.com> * * SMP-threaded, sysctl's added @@ -61,6 +11,8 @@ * (c) 2001 Red Hat Inc * Lockless wakeup * (c) 2003 Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com> + * Further wakeup optimizations, documentation + * (c) 2010 Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com> * * support for audit of ipc object properties and permission changes * Dustin Kirkland <dustin.kirkland@us.ibm.com> @@ -68,6 +20,57 @@ * namespaces support * OpenVZ, SWsoft Inc. * Pavel Emelianov <xemul@openvz.org> + * + * Implementation notes: (May 2010) + * This file implements System V semaphores. + * + * User space visible behavior: + * - FIFO ordering for semop() operations (just FIFO, not starvation + * protection) + * - multiple semaphore operations that alter the same semaphore in + * one semop() are handled. + * - sem_ctime (time of last semctl()) is updated in the IPC_SET, SETVAL and + * SETALL calls. + * - two Linux specific semctl() commands: SEM_STAT, SEM_INFO. + * - undo adjustments at process exit are limited to 0..SEMVMX. + * - namespace are supported. + * - SEMMSL, SEMMNS, SEMOPM and SEMMNI can be configured at runtine by writing + * to /proc/sys/kernel/sem. + * - statistics about the usage are reported in /proc/sysvipc/sem. + * + * Internals: + * - scalability: + * - all global variables are read-mostly. + * - semop() calls and semctl(RMID) are synchronized by RCU. + * - most operations do write operations (actually: spin_lock calls) to + * the per-semaphore array structure. + * Thus: Perfect SMP scaling between independent semaphore arrays. + * If multiple semaphores in one array are used, then cache line + * trashing on the semaphore array spinlock will limit the scaling. + * - semncnt and semzcnt are calculated on demand in count_semncnt() and + * count_semzcnt() + * - the task that performs a successful semop() scans the list of all + * sleeping tasks and completes any pending operations that can be fulfilled. + * Semaphores are actively given to waiting tasks (necessary for FIFO). + * (see update_queue()) + * - To improve the scalability, the actual wake-up calls are performed after + * dropping all locks. (see wake_up_sem_queue_prepare(), + * wake_up_sem_queue_do()) + * - All work is done by the waker, the woken up task does not have to do + * anything - not even acquiring a lock or dropping a refcount. + * - A woken up task may not even touch the semaphore array anymore, it may + * have been destroyed already by a semctl(RMID). + * - The synchronizations between wake-ups due to a timeout/signal and a + * wake-up due to a completed semaphore operation is achieved by using an + * intermediate state (IN_WAKEUP). + * - UNDO values are stored in an array (one per process and per + * semaphore array, lazily allocated). For backwards compatibility, multiple + * modes for the UNDO variables are supported (per process, per thread) + * (see copy_semundo, CLONE_SYSVSEM) + * - There are two lists of the pending operations: a per-array list + * and per-semaphore list (stored in the array). This allows to achieve FIFO + * ordering without always scanning all pending operations. + * The worst-case behavior is nevertheless O(N^2) for N wakeups. */ #include <linux/slab.h> |
