Am 07.10.2010 13:00, Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote: > Jan Kiszka wrote: >>> Maybe that could be bundled in rtdm_lock_get_disable_irq(lock, irq) ? >>> Disabling an irq line should be pretty fast on non-x86, besides, if the >>> original code used spin_lock_bh, it is maybe because the critical >>> section is expected to be lengthy, so irqsave/irqrestore may cause high >>> latencies in the rest of the system. >> >> Generally spoken, disabling preemption can cause high latencies as well >> as most critical paths include a task switch. However, anything that is >> more light-weight than irqsave/restore and has compatible semantics >> would still be welcome. It just requires some relevant performance >> and/or latency gain to justify complications in the locking model. >> >> We actually have two or so cases in RTnet where drivers contain long >> locked code paths (orders of a few hundred microseconds). In those >> cases, disabling the IRQ line without any preemption lock is the only >> way to keep system latencies in reasonable limits. But those are still >> corner cases. > > The interrupt latency also matters in some cases (which is why, for > instance, Xenomai switches contexts with irqs on ARM and powerpc now, > this does not improve scheduling latency, only irq latency). This new > kind of spinlocking would be a solution to replace spinlock_bh.
We still have no BH in Xenomai to protect against (and I don't think we want them). So every porting case still needs careful analysis to translate from the Linux model to RTDM. What would be possible with a preemption-disabling spin_lock is inter-task synchronization without IRQ disabling - kind of light-weight mutexes (/wrt their worst case, ie. contention). > > I suspect the drivers which will cause long critical sections are the > ones where the packets needs to be copied using PIO, instead of DMA. > Such drivers still exist, especially in the non-x86 word. Right, but not all have excessive access times. And we should better address the expensive cases with IRQ threads (which is an overdue to-do for RTDM) so that normal mutexes can be used. Jan -- Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT T DE IT 1 Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/beautyoftheweb _______________________________________________ RTnet-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rtnet-developers

