24 Settembre (Friday) at 15:00 hours

Andrea Arcangeli: "The Linux Kernel: SMP, ext2 and filesystem"

Symmetric Multi Processing

• Advantages and disadvantages of Symmetric Multi Processing
• Managing data structures in a SMP environment. Examples from the Linux Kernel
• CPU data structures
• Shared data structures
• Consequences SMP race conditions
• Examples of race conditions
• Subtle details of the architecture relevant to writing SMP-safe code
• SMP barriers
• Memory barriers at assembly level
• Strong memory barriers at CPU level
• Read/write strong memory barriers
• Example usages of memory barriers in the Linux Kernel
• Why using spinlocks
• How spinlocks work and their implementation
• Spinlocks in C
• OpenGL animation of my idea of spinlocks
• Linus' e-mail that explains spinlock usage
• Further examples of SMP locking (semaphors)