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I am new to Linux and am reading Linux device drivers book by Rubini & Corbet. I am confused at one statement related to spinlocks; the book states

If a nonpreemptive uniprocessor system ever went into a spin on a lock, it would spin forever; no other thread would ever be able to obtain the CPU to release the lock. For this reason, spinlock operations on uniprocessor systems without preemption enabled are optimized to do nothing, with the exception of the ones that change the IRQ masking status.

Further the book states

The kernel preemption case is handled by the spinlock code itself. Any time kernel code holds a spinlock, preemption is disabled on the relevant processor. Even uniprocessor systems must disable preemption in this way to avoid race conditions.

Question : On a uniprocessor system, if kernel preemption is disabled whenever a kernel code (executing on behalf of the user process) holds the spinlock, then how could another process ever get a chance to run and hence try at acquring the spinlock ? Why does Linux Kernel disables kernel preemption whenever kernel code holds a spinlock?

Abhijeet Kasurde
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Vishal Gandhi
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4 Answers4

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The answer to your first question is the reasoning behind your second.

Spinlocks acquired by the kernel may be implemented by turning off preemption, because this ensures that the kernel will complete its critical section without another process interfering. The entire point is that another process will not be able to run until the kernel releases the lock.

There is no reason that it has to be implemented this way; it is just a simple way to implement it and prevents any process from spinning on the lock that the kernel holds. But this trick only works for the case in which the kernel has acquired the lock: user processes can not turn off preemption, and if the kernel is spinning (i.e. it tries to acquire a spinlock but another process already holds it) it better leave preemption on! Otherwise the system will hang since the kernel is waiting for a lock that will not be released because the process holding it can not release it.

The kernel acquiring a spinlock is a special case. If a user level program acquires a spinlock, preemption will not be disabled.

superdesk
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  • thanks superdesk, but i still have a doubt; if acquiring a spinlock disables kernel preemption, the process that has acquired the spinlock has exclusive access to the critical section & can execute it **without even getting preempted** (unless the process holding the spinlock explicitly releases the cpu). Then how does another process ever run and "spin" on the spinlock ? Am I missing out something basic here ? – Vishal Gandhi Aug 15 '13 at 15:54
  • Preemption is only disabled if it is the kernel that is acquiring the lock, and the kernel is trusted to release the lock when it is finished. You are absolutely correct; no other process will spin on the lock in this case. But this is a special case. Most of the time it will be user level programs that are trying to acquire the spinlock. Preemption will NOT be disabled, and if two processes try to acquire the same lock, one of them will end up spinning. – superdesk Aug 15 '13 at 16:09
  • Fyi, if you compile the Linux kernel without CONFIG_SMP the macro for spinlocks will only disable the local interrupt system and update some variables for scheduler. there will be no busy waiting. I think they designed it so because you probably would know what you are doing when writing for the kernel in the first place anyway. – hoholee12 Jan 15 '21 at 11:05
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process A and process B both access same data, so you define a SPIN LOCK. if A is holding the lock but keep preemption enabled. then A may be scheduled out, and B has a chance to run. if B try to get the lock. B will spin and waste cpu.

spin lock is designed for efficiency and protect small & fast critical zone. so spin block disable preemption. if you want lock but keep preemption enabled. you can use mutex lock.

when Process A release the lock, preemption is enabled again. so other process has a chance to run. before that, only hardware interrupt and software irqs can run.

yuanjianpeng
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Any time kernel code holds a spinlock, preemption is disabled on the relevant processor only. This means if this is a SMP system, preemption is disabled only on the current processor, other processors running concurrently still free to acquire that lock and do busy waiting. Thus a sleep after holding the spinlock can cause deadlock.

Whereas in the case of a single processor system, preemption has to be disabled because in case another process holds the lock it will keep busy waiting and won't allow the first process to release the lock.

Saurabh Sengar
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Spinlocks disable preemption only on uniprocessors. So in case of a single processor: let's say the scheduler has the following processes in it's queue: P1, P2, P3, P4 - all requesting a spinlock L. All of them will get the lock as they are queued (i.e P1 followed by P2 etc)

The reason that preemption is disabled on a uniprocessor system is: If not: P1 holds the lock and after a time is scheduled out. Now P2 starts executing and let's say requests the same spinlock. Since P1 has not released the spinlock, P2 must spin and do nothing. So the execution time of P2 is wasted. It makes more sense to let P1 release the lock and then allow it to be preempted. Also since there is no other processor, simply by disallowing preemption we know that there will never be another process that runs in parallel on another processor and accesses the same critical section.

Similarly, if your critical section is shared with that of an interrupt, we need to disable interrupts locally on that processor. In the case of interrupts, they are never scheduled out. Thus it is important that the interrupt never requests a lock already held by the process it interrupted. Such a process will never run on any other processor as it was not scheduled out and hence it will never get a chance of releasing the lock. Thus the interrupt handler will never complete leading to a deadlock. Hence in such a case we always disable local interrupts on the processor.

Surbhi
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  • >> "Spinlocks disable preemption only on uniprocessors." This doesn't look correct, please add any reference which concludes this – Saurabh Sengar Dec 11 '21 at 11:35