Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Fri, 8 Jun 2012 18:14:43 -0500

Hi Michael,

On 2012-06-08 Michael Davidsaver wrote:
> > Have you looked at the epicsAtomicLock() and epicsAtomicUnlock() routines
> > that Jeff uses in some of his epicsAtomic implementations?
> 
> It looks like the current posix implementation uses a global lock
> similar to epicsInterrupt.  Do you see a way this could be avoided?

Ahh, that implementation is only used if the compiler does not support the 
atomic operations directly, which is not what you want at all.  Sorry, I think 
I pointed you up completely the wrong tree there.

> My goal for the thread pool implementation is to, as much as possible,
> allow two pools to function independently.  Having a global mutex used
> in the queuing and dequeuing processes seems a likely point of contention.

Agreed.  We do need a spinlock API in Base, and you are the first person to 
publicly propose one, so at the moment you win, although I expect Jeff has 
already developed one...

Looking back at your original proposal, I have some naming suggestions:

> struct epicsSL;
> typedef struct epicsSL epicsSL;

typedef struct epicsSpin epicsSpin;

> typedef unsigned long epicsSLFlag;

What actually gets stored in this (why is it a ULong)?  Part of me would like 
to use the term "key" or maybe "state" instead of "flag", but that depends 
what it's actually for.

typedef unsigned long epicsSpinKey;

> #define epicsSLLocalFlag(name) epicsSLFlag name = 0

Not keen, depends on answer above...

> epicsSL* epicsSLCreate()
> void epicsSLDestroy(epicsSL*);

epicsSpin* epicsSpinCreate(void);
void epicsSpinDestroy(epicsSpin*);

> void epicsSLLock(epicsSL*, epicsSLFlag*);
> int epicsSLTryLock(epicsSL*, epicsSLFlag*);
> void epicsSLUnlock(epicsSL*, epicsSLFlag*);

void epicsSpinLock(epicsSpin *, epicsSpinKey *);
int epicsSpinTry(epicsSpin *, epicsSpinKey *);
void epicsSpinUnlock(epicsSpin *, epicsSpinKey *);

We'll talk more on Monday...

- Andrew
-- 
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System