Spinlocking
Additional spinlock types
The pipeline core introduces two spinlock types:
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hard spinlocks manipulate the CPU interrupt mask, and don’t affect the kernel preemption state in locking/unlocking operations.
This type of spinlock is useful for implementing a critical section to serialize concurrent accesses from both in-band and out-of-band contexts, i.e. from in-band and oob stages. Obviously, sleeping into a critical section protected by a hard spinlock would be a very bad idea. In other words, hard spinlocks are not subject to virtual interrupt masking, therefore can be used to serialize with out-of-band activities, including from the in-band kernel code. At any rate, those sections ought to be quite short, for keeping latency low.
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hybrid spinlocks are used internally by the pipeline core to protect access to IRQ descriptors (
struct irq_desc::lock), so that we can keep the original locking scheme of the generic IRQ core unmodified for handling out-of-band interrupts.Hybrid spinlocks behave like hard spinlocks when traversed by the low-level IRQ handling code on entry to the pipeline, otherwise like common raw spinlocks in other contexts, preserving the kernel (virtualized) interrupt and preemption states as perceived by the in-band context. This type of lock is not meant to be used in any other situation.
Lockdep support
The lock validator automatically reconciles the real and virtual interrupt states, so it can deliver proper diagnosis for locking constructs defined in both in-band and out-of-band contexts. This means that hard and hybrid spinlocks are included in the validation set when LOCKDEP is enabled.
These two additional types are subject to LOCKDEP analysis. However, be aware that latency figures are likely to be really bad when LOCKDEP is enabled, due to the large amount of work the lock validator may have to do with interrupts disabled for the CPU (i.e. hard locking) for enforcing critical sections.
