Efficient lock hand-off in a symmetric multiprocessing system

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-8930952-B2
Application number	US-201213426293-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Mar 21, 2012
Priority date	Mar 21, 2012
Publication date	Jan 6, 2015
Grant date	Jan 6, 2015

Abstract

Provided are techniques for providing a first lock, corresponding to a resource, in a memory that is global to a plurality of processor; spinning, by a first thread running on a first processor of the processors, at a low hardware-thread priority on the first lock such that the first processor does not yield processor cycles to a hypervisor; spinning, by a second thread running on a second processor, on a second lock in a memory local to the second processor such that the second processor is configured to yield processor cycles to the hypervisor; acquiring the lock and the corresponding resource by the first thread; and, in response to the acquiring of the lock by the first thread, spinning, by the second thread, at the low hardware-thread priority on the first lock rather than the second lock such that the second processor does not yield processor cycles to the hypervisor.

First claim

We claim:

1. An apparatus, comprising:
a plurality of physical processors in a multiprocessor system;
a first lock accessible by each processor of the plurality of processors;
a computer-readable storage medium; and
logic, stored on the computer-readable storage medium, and executed on the plurality of processors, for:
acquiring, by a first thread running on a first processor of a plurality of processors, the first lock corresponding to a resource;
spinning, by a second…

Assignees

• Michel Dirk
• Olszewski Bret R
• Vaidyanathan Basu
• IBM

Inventors

• Michel Dirk
• Olszewski Bret R
• Vaidyanathan Basu

Classifications

• G06F9/526 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F9/52 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic