implementation is by no means perfect as far as some of the algorithms
that it uses and the fact that it is missing some functionality (try
locks and upgrades/downgrades are not there yet), however it does seem
to work in my local testing. There is more detail in the comments in the
code, but the short version follows.
A reader/writer lock is very much like a regular mutex: it cannot be held
across a voluntary sleep; it can be acquired in an interrupt thread; if
the lock is held by a writer then the priority of any threads that block
on the lock will be lent to the owner; the simple case lock operations all
are done in a single atomic op. It also shares some similiarities
with sx locks: it supports reader/writer semantics (multiple readers,
but single writers); readers are allowed to recurse, but writers are not.
We can extend this implementation further by either improving algorithms
or adding new functionality, but this should at least give us a base to
work with now.
Reviewed by: arch (in theory)
Tested on: i386 (4 cpu box with a kernel module that used 4 threads
that randomly chose between read locks and write locks
that ran w/o panicing for over a day solid. It usually
panic'd within a few seconds when there were bugs during
testing. :) The kernel module source is available on
request.)
