ring-buffer: make lockless

This patch converts the ring buffers into a completely lockless
buffer recording system. The read side still takes locks since
we still serialize readers. But the writers are the ones that
must be lockless (those can happen in NMIs).

The main change is to the "head_page" pointer. We write to the
tail, and read from the head. The "head_page" pointer in the cpu
buffer is now just a reference to where to look. The real head
page is now kept in the head_page->list->prev->next pointer.
That is, in the list head of the previous page we set flags.

The list pages are allocated to be aligned such that the lowest
significant bits are always zero pointing to the list. This gives
us play to put in flags to their pointers.

bit 0: set when the page is a head page
bit 1: set when the writer is moving the page (for overwrite mode)

cmpxchg is used to update the pointer.

When the writer wraps the buffer and the tail meets the head,
in overwrite mode, the writer must move the head page forward.
It first uses cmpxchg to change the pointer flag from 1 to 2.
Once this is done, the reader on another CPU will not take the
page from the buffer.

The writers need to protect against interrupts (we don't bother with
disabling interrupts because NMIs are allowed to write too).

After the writer sets the pointer flag to 2, it takes care to
manage interrupts coming in. This is discribed in detail within the
comments of the code.

 Changes in version 2:
  - Let reader reset entries value of header page.
  - Fix tail page passing commit page on reader page test.
  - Always increment entries and write counter in rb_tail_page_update
  - Add safety check in rb_set_commit_to_write to break out of infinite loop
  - add mask in rb_is_reader_page

[ Impact: lock free writing to the ring buffer ]

Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions