Bosko Milekic 9ed346bab0 Change and clean the mutex lock interface.
mtx_enter(lock, type) becomes:

mtx_lock(lock) for sleep locks (MTX_DEF-initialized locks)
mtx_lock_spin(lock) for spin locks (MTX_SPIN-initialized)

similarily, for releasing a lock, we now have:

mtx_unlock(lock) for MTX_DEF and mtx_unlock_spin(lock) for MTX_SPIN.
We change the caller interface for the two different types of locks
because the semantics are entirely different for each case, and this
makes it explicitly clear and, at the same time, it rids us of the
extra `type' argument.

The enter->lock and exit->unlock change has been made with the idea
that we're "locking data" and not "entering locked code" in mind.

Further, remove all additional "flags" previously passed to the
lock acquire/release routines with the exception of two:

MTX_QUIET and MTX_NOSWITCH

The functionality of these flags is preserved and they can be passed
to the lock/unlock routines by calling the corresponding wrappers:

mtx_{lock, unlock}_flags(lock, flag(s)) and
mtx_{lock, unlock}_spin_flags(lock, flag(s)) for MTX_DEF and MTX_SPIN
locks, respectively.

Re-inline some lock acq/rel code; in the sleep lock case, we only
inline the _obtain_lock()s in order to ensure that the inlined code
fits into a cache line. In the spin lock case, we inline recursion and
actually only perform a function call if we need to spin. This change
has been made with the idea that we generally tend to avoid spin locks
and that also the spin locks that we do have and are heavily used
(i.e. sched_lock) do recurse, and therefore in an effort to reduce
function call overhead for some architectures (such as alpha), we
inline recursion for this case.

Create a new malloc type for the witness code and retire from using
the M_DEV type. The new type is called M_WITNESS and is only declared
if WITNESS is enabled.

Begin cleaning up some machdep/mutex.h code - specifically updated the
"optimized" inlined code in alpha/mutex.h and wrote MTX_LOCK_SPIN
and MTX_UNLOCK_SPIN asm macros for the i386/mutex.h as we presently
need those.

Finally, caught up to the interface changes in all sys code.

Contributors: jake, jhb, jasone (in no particular order)
2001-02-09 06:11:45 +00:00
..
1999-08-28 01:08:13 +00:00

$FreeBSD$

Using Soft Updates

To enable the soft updates feature in your kernel, add option
SOFTUPDATES to your kernel configuration.

Once you are running a kernel with soft update support, you need to enable
it for whichever filesystems you wish to run with the soft update policy.
This is done with the -n option to tunefs(8) on the UNMOUNTED filesystems,
e.g. from single-user mode you'd do something like:

	tunefs -n enable /usr

To permanently enable soft updates on the /usr filesystem (or at least
until a corresponding ``tunefs -n disable'' is done).


Soft Updates Copyright Restrictions

As of June 2000 the restrictive copyright has been removed and 
replaced with a `Berkeley-style' copyright. The files implementing
soft updates now reside in the sys/ufs/ffs directory and are
compiled into the generic kernel by default.


Soft Updates Status

The soft updates code has been running in production on many
systems for the past two years generally quite successfully.
The two current sets of shortcomings are:

1) On filesystems that are chronically full, the two minute lag
   from the time a file is deleted until its free space shows up
   will result in premature filesystem full failures. This
   failure mode is most evident in small filesystems such as
   the root. For this reason, use of soft updates is not
   recommended on the root filesystem.

2) If your system routines runs parallel processes each of which
   remove many files, the kernel memory rate limiting code may
   not be able to slow removal operations to a level sustainable
   by the disk subsystem. The result is that the kernel runs out
   of memory and hangs.

Both of these problems are being addressed, but have not yet
been resolved. There are no other known problems at this time.


How Soft Updates Work

For more general information on soft updates, please see:
	http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/
	http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/CSE-TR-254-95/

--
Marshall Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
July 2000