On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@xxxxxx> wrote: > By default, queue rwlock is fair among writers and gives preference > to readers allowing them to steal lock even if a writer is > waiting. However, there is a desire to have a fair variant of > rwlock that is more deterministic. To enable this [..] Is there really any point in having the option for unfair at all? >From your timings, it looks like the unfair locks are more expensive for the writer side, but since pretty much the whole point of rwlocks is when readers are the common case, I don't think we care. And I'm not at all convinced we want the complexity of two different kinds of rwlocks with different semantics and extra code for said semantics.. Your *original* fair rwlocks were unusable, since they didn't allow for the irq semantics that most users need, but afaik your current version always makes an irq/bh-context reader work even when the lock is otherwise trying to be fair, so this whole dual behavior seems to be largely pointless. No? Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html