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Moving ufs to pthreads


From: Thomas Thomas
Subject: Moving ufs to pthreads
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2012 14:58:06 -0700 (PDT)

This is mostly an informational rant: feel free to ignore most of it. I think I 
have
gotten down what was going on in UFS. In Savannah task 5487, Samuel wrote:
> - Note the code in urfs/pager.c: it looks inside the rwlock in an ugly 
> way. It looks like it is just trying to wait for the read lock to be 
> available, but not actually lock.
The part of me with OOP beaten into it agrees that the code uses the lock in
an inappropriate way, but another part of me sees the elegance of the solution.
In sizes.c, the code again reaches into the lock in an ugly way, and it reveals
why such behavior is occurring.

There is a condition in which readers of the object that the rwlock protects
can access the resource without needing to acquire the lock. The code in
pager.c is a mutated trylock that allows threads to wait to either get the
lock or have that condition occur. The part in sizes.c signals that the
specific condition is valid to any threads waiting for the lock or condition.

The attached file is a patch to the previous pthreads patch. It adds a
condition and a lock to each resource object to allow the previous
behavior without violating the integrity of any pthread locking
primitives. The manner in which our pthread implementation handles
rwlocks is so very different from how cthreads does that trying to pull
the same trick isn't feasible, anyway.

I think that the previous pthread code was the direct conversion to
pthreads of cthreads calls that produced a similar chain of events
as what the code was doing. It was trying to answer "How do I do this
in pthreads?" and not "What is going on?"

TD

PS - Does anyone use UFS?

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