[PATCH] Adding Solaris-style "owner of records" to rwlocks

This is a first implementation of the owner of records concept in rwlocks.
It allows to avoid the priority inversion problem in the current
rwlocks implementation (for readers).

The main idea (that John and I discussed) is to have as owner of
records the first rlock'er for a "class contention".
The implementation consists in adding two flags (RW_LOCK_OWNED and
RW_LOCK_EXEMPTED) which are used in order to not penalyze the easy
case, and syncronizing the operation of acquiring and dropping the
owner of records with the turnstile spin-lock.
The main scheme might work in this way:

thread1::rlock() -> sets the owner of records
thread2::rlock() -> checks for RW_LOCK_OWNED bit and, if it is set, go
in the easy case
thread3::rlock() -> checks for RW_LOCK_OWNED...
thread4::wlock() -> blocks and land its priority to thread1
thread1::runlock() -> disable the owner of records (disowning the
associated turnstile) and sets the RW_LOCK_EXEMPTED flag. In this way
other threads will treact as an easy case.
...

What I actually need is a testing suite for heavy-load contentions,
since I would like to detect eventual races I missed, etc. If somebody
has a get-ready testing suite, please, let me know.

The patch against HEAD is here:
http://users.gufi.org/~rookie/works/patches/rwlocks.diff

Please, this is not intended to be a final implementation for this,
since I think that it can be improved; it is just a starting point for
ongoing works and improvements.

Let me know if something is not clear. Feedbacks, comments, ideas are welcome.

Thanks,
Attilio


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