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[20070208]
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Merging newlock2: consequences on in-kernel locking, SMP and threading
Andrew Doran has made substantial progress on the newlock2 branch,
and he
is now ready to merge the branch into NetBSD-current.
Some of the changes this will bring are (citing from Andrew's mail, mostly):
- A new set of synchronization primitives in the kernel designed
to make programming for multiprocessor systems easier and more efficient:
mutexes, reader / writer locks, condition variables, sleep queues and MI
memory barrier operations.
- A number of underlying kernel facilties have
been made 'multiprocessor safe' including the scheduler, ktrace and the
general purpose method of kernel synchronisation: sleep & wakeup
- Some application facilities have been made MP safe and can now run without
the "big lock" on multiprocessor systems, including signalling, SysV
messaging, and system calls that inspect process state, for example:
wait().
- The number of system calls that will run without
the big lock went from 1 up to 56, with more in the pipeline. For workloads
that are fork intensive and make heavy use of signals this will show a
small yet quantifiable benefit on multi-way systems.
- The branch introduces a new 1:1 threading model that allows multithreaded
applications to take advantage of all available CPUs in a multi-way
system. The scheduler activations implementation used from NetBSD 2.0
through NetBSD 4.0 provides execellent performance on single CPU systems,
but restricts any instance of a threaded application to a single CPU in
the system. Given that multicore and multi-CPU systems are increasingly
commonplace and that single threaded CPUs are rapidly disappearing from
the market, we made the decision to move to a new threading model, on the
basis that providing increased concurrency is now the most important
factor in ensuring good performance for threaded workloads.
- Those following
source-changes
already know what that new 1:1 threading model means for the
scheduler-activations based m:n threading model:
it's gone.
Read
Andrew's mail
for all the details, and esp. on how to update your system
after the merge if you run -current!
[Tags: kernel, smp, threads]
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