The PI chain walk is implemented by the function rt_mutex_adjust_prio_chain. The implementation has gone through several iterations, and has ended up with what we believe is the best. It walks the PI chain by only grabbing at most two locks at a time, and is very efficient. The rt_mutex_adjust_prio_chain can be used either to boost or lower process priorities. rt_mutex_adjust_prio_chain is called with a task to be checked for PI (de)boosting (the owner of a mutex that a process is blocking on), a flag to check for deadlocking, the mutex that the task owns, and a pointer to a waiter that is the process’s waiter struct that is blocked on the mutex (although this parameter may be NULL for deboosting). For this explanation, I will not mention deadlock detection. This explanation will try to stay at a high level. When this function is called, there are no locks held. That also means that the state of the owner and lock can change when entered into this function. Before this function is called, the task has already had rt_mutex_adjust_prio performed on it. This means that the task is set to the priority that it should be at, but the plist nodes of the task’s waiter have not been updated with the new priorities, and that this task may not be in the proper locations in the pi_lists and wait_lists that the task is blocked on. This function solves all that. A loop is entered, where task is the owner to be checked for PI changes that was passed by parameter (for the first iteration) […]
In Linux kernel documentation. Author: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Reviewers: Ingo Molnar, Thomas Gleixner, Thomas Duetsch, and Randy Dunlap
