Denis, Thanks for the feedback, I have given explanation for locking below. Thanks, Raji -----Original Message----- From: Denis Kenzior [mailto:denkenz(a)gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 8:17 PM To: ofono(a)ofono.org Cc: Bommaraju, Rajyalakshmi Subject: Re: Description of Voice call history plugin patch Hi Raji, > Design : Plugin uses memory mapped file for high performance input/output operations. File is used as cyclic queue for storing or reading records, it store s 50 records of 78bytes,hence fixed size file of 3916 bytes is used. File's first 16 bytes were used for storing header, and next 3900 bytes for data. Header structure has head pointer, tail pointer,unread and lastid. Head pointer points to next slot for writing record into,tail for reading record, unread for number of history records unread by client, lastid for id of the last record that is written. Just a couple quick points. Memory mapped files do not really give any benefit over read/write/lseek for small files (e.g. less than a few pages) with small record sizes (e.g. less than a 4K page.) In fact they're probably slower in these cases. > Locking: > Accessing Memory mapped file pointer , all header fields (head,tail,unread,lastid), temp_unread,temp_tail are synchronized by a mutex. writing into memory file and reading from memory file happen asynchronously, so mutex is used to protect the memory mapped file pointer , header, temp_unread, temp_tail. I'm totally confused by this one; you use no threads in your plugin (and neither does oFono) and you have no external clients accessing the same shared memory region. It seems to me that locking is completely unnecessary. Raji > History reads are client driven, can happen during the write operation. Same with writing, if there is any read operation in progress, write operation needs to wait. So the mutex will lock the memory information until read/write operation is done.