[email protected] (Mike O'Dell) writes:

> very fine-grain-locked systems often display convoying and
> are prone to priority inversion problems.  coarse-grained

Priority inversion problems are design flaws.  Depending on the type
of locks, they may not even be possible.  Spin locks held for short
periods of time (typical for very fine-grained systems) can't cause
priority inversion because the process holding the lock can't block.

> we published the best Unix SMP paper I've ever seen in Computing
> Systems - from the Amdahl guys who did an SMP version of the kernel
> by very clever hacks on SPLx() macros to make them spin locks and
> a bit of other clever trickery on the source.  they could take a stock

An approach like that can't possibly be sufficient if code has been
written with the assumption that only interrupt-like events or
blocking calls can change things from under it.  There is quite a bit
of code in FreeBSD that relies on this.


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