On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Peter Zijlstra peterz@infradead.org wrote:
I do believe we can win a bit by keeping the wait list sorted, if we also make sure that waiters don't add themselves in the first place if they see that a deadlock situation cannot be avoided.
I will probably want to extend struct mutex_waiter with ww_mutex-specific fields to facilitate this (i.e. ctx pointer, perhaps stamp as well to reduce pointer-chasing). That should be fine since it lives on the stack.
Right, shouldn't be a problem I think.
The only 'problem' I can see with using that is that its possible to mix ww and !ww waiters through ww_mutex_lock(.ctx = NULL). This makes the list order somewhat tricky.
Ideally we'd remove that feature, although I see its actually used quite a bit :/
I guess we could create a small fake acquire_ctx for single-lock paths. That way callers still don't need to deal with having an explicit ctx, but we can assume the timestamp (for ensuring fairness) is available for all cases. Otherwise there's indeed a problem with correctly (well fairly) interleaving ctx and non-ctx lockers I think. -Daniel