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RCU-safe reference countingRCU-safe reference countingPosted Jul 17, 2004 0:54 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: RCU-safe reference counting by sjmadsen Parent article: RCU-safe reference counting >Never mind that cmpxchg() is a spinlock in different clothes I believe it beats a spinlock because the processor can implement it without actually stopping all the other CPUs. It can go ahead and do the whole operation as if the other CPUs didn't exist, then check whether there had been any conflicting activity by another CPU, and in the unlikely event that there was, try again. The spinlock requires all the other CPUs (that want that lock) to stop doing work while the one holder runs. But here, we aren't talking about using cmpxchg() per se instead of a spinlock. We're talking about using it as part of some RCU logic so that an entire sequence of (lookup, find, and add a reference) can happen at the same time as another thread is destroying the found object. Traditionally, that whole sequence would be covered by a spinlock, and two CPUs at a time could not do it, even for different objects. Nor could any CPU destroy any object while another CPU was in this lookup sequence. CPUs would be waiting for another CPU to do something that isn't even an actual conflict.
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