Aleksey,
As far as I understand OS internals, both Windows and Linux does not
make "syscall"s unless contension happens. So, pthread_mutex_lock (or
EnterCriticalSection) in case of single thread is just an atomic
increment.
WBR,
Pavel.
On 2/13/08, Aleksey Shipilev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi, Alexei, all,
>
> Just another idea for startup optimizations pops out of our talk with
> Egor Pasko. :)
>
> As you probably know there are many places in VM and JIT that use
> locking for safety reasons. Most of this locking is driven by mutexes,
> that is, the kernel calls. That's a good option in case of contention,
> because such locking will need arbitration (e.g. "who will take the
> mutex next"?) from kernel side. But what if that locking is not
> contended? Even then we will make the kernel call for trying to catch
> the mutex.
>
> Linux has long ago implemented such thing as "fast user-space mutex",
> "futex" [1]. Generally it is simple memory region that could be
> incremented/decremented atomically. In case of contention futex, of
> course, will resort to kernel-side mutex.
>
> That mean we could save precious time using futexes instead of
> mutexes: we definitely will save on kernel call time.
>
> AFAIK, current implementation of porting layer has no support for
> futexes even on Linux side. And so we might try to implement them for
> Windows part and use the Linux-provided futex'es on Linux part. Then
> after the implementation of hyfutex_lock/unlock we might try to
> migrate performance-significant locks to futexes one-by-one. Profilers
> are good directions, maybe anywhere else too.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Thanks,
> Aleksey,
> ESSD, Intel
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex
>
