Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:54:11 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: vmstat's entries type Message-ID: <200607251254.k6PCsBef092737@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <200607241712.23917.jhb@freebsd.org>
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John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> wrote: > On Sunday 23 July 2006 20:03, Sten Daniel Sørsdal wrote: > > sthaug@nethelp.no wrote: > > > > > One approach that we could use for 64-bit counters would be to just > > > > > use 32-bits one, and poll them for overflow and bump an overflow > > > > > count. This assumes that the 32-bit counters overflow much less often > > > > > than the polling interval, and easily triples the amount of storage > > > > > for each of them... It is ugly :-( > > > > > > > > > What's wrong with the add+adc (asm) approach found on any i386? > > > > > > Presumably the fact that add + adc isn't an atomic operation. So if > > > you want to guarantee 64 bit consistency, you need locking or similar. > > > > > > > Would it not be necessary to do this locking anyway? > > I don't see how polling for overflow would help this consistency. > > Are both suggestions insufficient? > > I actually think that add + adc is ok for the case of incrementing simple > counters. You can even do 'inc ; addc $0' (I'm familiar with asm programming, but I'm not a low-level threading or SMP expert, so please excuse me if this is a dumb question ...) If you just do add+adc (or inc+adc) and another thread (on the same or different processor, I don't know) happens to read the counter value at the same time (i.e. after the lower 32bit have overflowed, but before the upper 32bit get incremented), then that other thread would get a value that's off by 2^32. What am I missing? Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. "And believe me, as a C++ programmer, I don't hesitate to question the decisions of language designers. After a decent amount of C++ exposure, Python's flaws seem ridiculously small." -- Ville Vainio
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