Re: [PATCH v7 5/6] lib/dlock-list: Enable faster lookup with hashing

[Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>]

On 10/09/2017 09:08 AM, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Oct 2017, Waiman Long wrote:
>
>> Insertion and deletion is relatively cheap and mostly contention
>> free for dlock-list. Lookup, on the other hand, can be rather costly
>> because all the lists in a dlock-list will have to be iterated.
>>
>> Currently dlock-list insertion is based on the cpu that the task is
>> running on. So a given object can be inserted into any one of the
>> lists depending on what the current cpu is.
>>
>> This patch provides an alternative way of list selection. The caller
>> can provide a object context which will be hashed to one of the list
>> in a dlock-list. The object can then be added into that particular
>> list. Lookup can be done by iterating elements in the provided list
>> only instead of all the lists in a dlock-list.
>
> Unless I'm misusing the api, I could not find a standard way of
> iterating a _particular_ list head (the one the dlock_list_hash()
> returned). This is because iterators always want the all the heads.
>
> Also, in my particular epoll case I'd need the head->lock _not_ to
> be dropped after the iteration, and therefore is pretty adhoc.
> Currently we do:
>
> dlist_for_each_entry() {
>     // acquire head->lock for each list
> }
> // no locks held
> dlist_add()
>
> I'm thinking perhaps we could have dlist_check_add() which passes a
> callback to ensure we want to add the node. The function could acquire
> the head->lock and not release it until the very end. 

With the dlock_list_hash(), dlock-list is degenerated into a pool of
list where one is chosen by hashing. So the regular list iteration
macros like list_for_each_entry() can then be used. Of course, you have
to explicitly do the lock and unlock operation.

I could also encapsulate it a bit with inlined function like

dlock_list_single_iter_init(iter, dlist, head, flags)

It could set up the iterator properly to iterate only 1 list. The flags
can be to indicate holding the lock after iteration. In this case,
dlock_list_unlock(iter) will have to be called to do the unlock. I could
add a patch to do that if you prefer that route.

Cheers,
Longman