PFlock: Phase-Fair Reader-Writer Lock

This library provides a phase-fair reader-writer lock, as described in the paper "Reader-Writer Synchronization for Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems". by Brandenburg et. al.

Reader preference, writer preference, and task-fair reader-writer locks are shown to cause undue blocking in multiprocessor real-time systems. A new phase-fair reader-writer lock is proposed as an alternative that significantly reduces worst-case blocking for readers.

Example

use pflock::PFLock;

let lock = PFLock::new(5);

// many reader locks can be held at once
{
    let r1 = lock.read();
    let r2 = lock.read();
    assert_eq!(*r1, 5);
    assert_eq!(*r2, 5);
} // read locks are dropped at this point

// only one write lock may be held, however
{
    let mut w = lock.write();
    *w += 1;
    assert_eq!(*w, 6);
} // write lock is dropped here

Spin vs. suspend

PFLock is a spinlock specifically targeted at short critical sections and does not suspend threads while blocking. Section 3 of the paper addresses this:

The terms “short” and “long” arise because (intuitively) spinning is appropriate only for short critical sections, since spinning wastes processor time. However, two recent studies have shown that, in terms of schedulability, spinning is usually preferable to suspending when overheads are considered [11, 15]. Based on these trends (and due to space constraints), we restrict our focus to short resources in this paper and delegate RW synchronization of long resources to future work.

C implementation

A reference implementation in C is provided in the branch cnord/ffi in the directory pflock_c/. Run tests with the reference implementation using RUSTFLAGS="--cfg c_reference", e.g.

RUSTFLAGS="--cfg c_reference" cargo test

License

All code is under the MIT license except for the C implementation in pflock_c/, which has its own license in the file.

@inproceedings{brandenburg2009reader,
  title={Reader-writer synchronization for shared-memory multiprocessor real-time systems},
  author={Brandenburg, Bj{\"o}rn B and Anderson, James H},
  booktitle={2009 21st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems},
  pages={184--193},
  year={2009},
  organization={IEEE}
}