Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Improving Kernel Locks
Waiman Long posted a patch to implement a new type of futex, called the throughput-optimized (TO) futex. He intended it specifically for use in cases where data throughput was more important than any other issue, including ensuring that all processes were given fair access to resources protected by that lock.
Other futexes used for similar purposes include wait-wake and priority inheritance (PI) futexes. On certain benchmarks, Waiman saw that TO futexes performed significantly better than the others.
Thomas Gleixner had some concerns. Primarily, he wasn't sure a new futex was really needed in the kernel. He also felt that user space would need to support a similar locking mechanism, possibly via libc, if the TO futex were adopted in the kernel.
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