NUMA AWARE LOCKS

These primitives avoid lock starvation and increase performance on NUMA systems with high lock contention. As always, reducing lock contention is the right thing to do, but NUMA-aware locks can stop the bleeding while you are reworking your locking design.

NOTE: The current patch supercedes the first. They have been tested with the 2.4.6 kernel, but are implemented in a way to be fairly version independent. The patch is currently for both ia32 and ia64 architectures.

  1. This is the first version of Numa Aware Locks released 7/16/01.

  2. This is the current version of Numa Aware Locks released 8/01/01.
    The new release removes the unspin/respin routines from do_IRQ(), and also incorporates suggestions from the community.