Skip to content
  • Nick Piggin's avatar
    [PATCH] radix-tree: RCU lockless readside · 7cf9c2c7
    Nick Piggin authored
    
    
    Make radix tree lookups safe to be performed without locks.  Readers are
    protected against nodes being deleted by using RCU based freeing.  Readers
    are protected against new node insertion by using memory barriers to ensure
    the node itself will be properly written before it is visible in the radix
    tree.
    
    Each radix tree node keeps a record of their height (above leaf nodes).
    This height does not change after insertion -- when the radix tree is
    extended, higher nodes are only inserted in the top.  So a lookup can take
    the pointer to what is *now* the root node, and traverse down it even if
    the tree is concurrently extended and this node becomes a subtree of a new
    root.
    
    "Direct" pointers (tree height of 0, where root->rnode points directly to
    the data item) are handled by using the low bit of the pointer to signal
    whether rnode is a direct pointer or a pointer to a radix tree node.
    
    When a reader wants to traverse the next branch, they will take a copy of
    the pointer.  This pointer will be either NULL (and the branch is empty) or
    non-NULL (and will point to a valid node).
    
    [akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
    [Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com: bugfixes, comments, simplifications]
    [clameter@sgi.com: build fix]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
    Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
    Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    7cf9c2c7