Chapter 8. SMPng Design Document
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## Chapter 8. SMPng Design Document

Written by John Baldwin and Robert Watson.

Copyright © 2002, 2004-2005 John Baldwin, Robert Watson

## 8.1. Introduction

This document presents the current design and implementation of the SMPng Architecture. First, the basic primitives and tools are introduced. Next, a general architecture for the FreeBSD kernel's synchronization and execution model is laid out. Then, locking strategies for specific subsystems are discussed, documenting the approaches taken to introduce fine-grained synchronization and parallelism for each subsystem. Finally, detailed implementation notes are provided to motivate design choices, and make the reader aware of important implications involving the use of specific primitives.

This document is a work-in-progress, and will be updated to reflect on-going design and implementation activities associated with the SMPng Project. Many sections currently exist only in outline form, but will be fleshed out as work proceeds. Updates or suggestions regarding the document may be directed to the document editors.

The goal of SMPng is to allow concurrency in the kernel. The kernel is basically one rather large and complex program. To make the kernel multi-threaded we use some of the same tools used to make other programs multi-threaded. These include mutexes, shared/exclusive locks, semaphores, and condition variables. For the definitions of these and other SMP-related terms, please see the Glossary section of this article.

## Glossary

atomic

  An operation is atomic if all of its effects are visible to other CPUs together when the proper access protocol is followed. In the degenerate case are atomic instructions provided directly by machine architectures. At a higher level, if several members of a structure are protected by a lock, then a set of operations are atomic if they are all performed while holding the lock without releasing the lock in between any of the operations.

  See Also operation.

block

  A thread is blocked when it is waiting on a lock, resource, or condition. Unfortunately this term is a bit overloaded as a result.

  See Also sleep.

critical section

  A section of code that is not allowed to be preempted. A critical section is entered and exited using the critical_enter(9) API.

MD

  Machine dependent.

  See Also MI.

memory operation

  A memory operation reads and/or writes to a memory location.

MI

  Machine independent.

  See Also MD.

operation

  See memory operation.

primary interrupt context

  Primary interrupt context refers to the code that runs when an interrupt occurs. This code can either run an interrupt handler directly or schedule an asynchronous interrupt thread to execute the interrupt handlers for a given interrupt source.

realtime kernel thread

  A high priority kernel thread. Currently, the only realtime priority kernel threads are interrupt threads.

  See Also thread.

sleep

  A thread is asleep when it is blocked on a condition variable or a sleep queue via `msleep` or `tsleep`.

  See Also block.

sleepable lock

  A sleepable lock is a lock that can be held by a thread which is asleep. Lockmgr locks and sx locks are currently the only sleepable locks in FreeBSD. Eventually, some sx locks such as the allproc and proctree locks may become non-sleepable locks.

  See Also sleep.

thread

  A kernel thread represented by a struct thread. Threads own locks and hold a single execution context.

wait channel

  A kernel virtual address that threads may sleep on.

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