Hi David,
On 03/31/2015 10:36 PM, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-03-28 at 13:03 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>> If the timeout argument is non-NULL, its contents specify a rel‐
>>> ative timeout for the wait, measured according to the
>>> CLOCK_MONOTONIC clock. (This interval will be rounded up to the
>>> system clock granularity, and kernel scheduling delays mean that
>>> the blocking interval may overrun by a small amount.) If time‐
>>> out is NULL, the call blocks indefinitely.
>>
>> Would it not be better to only state that the wait will not return
>> before the timeout -- unless woken -- and not bother with clock
>> granularity and scheduling delays?
>
> Yeah, similarly we also have this:
>
> FUTEX_PRIVATE_FLAG (since Linux 2.6.22)
> This option bit can be employed with all futex operations. It
> tells the kernel that the futex is process-private and not
> shared with another process (i.e., it is only being used for
> synchronization between threads of the same process). This
> allows the kernel to choose the fast path for validating the
> user-space address and avoids expensive VMA lookups, taking ref‐
> erence counts on file backing store, and so on.
>
> This to me reads a bit too much into the kernel (fastpath, refcnt,
> vmas). Why not just mention that it avoids overhead in the kernel or
> something? I don't recall any manpage mentioning such details, but I
> could be wrong.
Thanks. Agreed. I changed this to
This allows the kernel to make some additional performance optimizations.
> In any case its a nit, the whole doc is pretty good and
> I hope you can merge it soon and then just increment ;)
I ran out of time and energy at a certain point. And also got a little
disheartened that I got more people complaining about groff markup
than actually looked looked at the FIXMEs in the page source :-).
I'll try to reboot the process.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/