A Survey on Minimizing Lock Contention in Shared Resources in Linux Kernel

Abstract

Many programs in multi-core environment use shared-memory parallelism using multi-threading. The multiple threads typically use locks to coordinate access the shared resources. In many cases, contention for locks reduces parallel efficiency and affects the scalability. Thus, it is important to study lock contention problems and its solutions in shared resources in multi-core era. In this paper, we investigate the studies to minimizing lock contention in shared resources in Linux kernel. For example, we study fine-grained locking mechanisms, lock-free based schemes, and scheduler schemes to minimize the lock contention in Linux kernel. Thus, we simplify and categorize the schemes and finally identify future research directions.