[strongSwan-dev] [PATCH] charon: improve scalability of half_open ike sa counting

[Tobias Brunner]

Hi Christoph,

Thanks for the patches.

I pushed some changes, together with your load-tester fixes, to the
atomic-ref branch [1] of our repository.  I did not apply your original
patch, however, mainly because of the following:

> +		count = this->half_open_count;

Depending on the architecture this could be problematic.  On many common
architectures it will probably work as expected, thanks to cache
coherency protocols and atomic int loads.  But there might be
architectures for which this is not the case.  And if we ever decided to
increase the size of refcount_t to 64-bit, loads would not be atomic
anymore on e.g. x86.
Therefore, I decided to introduce the ref_cur() macro, which atomically
returns the current value.  To make sure it's atomic (and we don't have
to care how to make it so) it resolves to __sync_fetch_and_add(ref, 0),
if available.

Additionally, I pushed a commit that uses the newer __atomic GCC
built-ins, that support the C++11 memory models, to implement the ref
counter macros.  This allows us to use the __ATOMIC_RELAXED memory model
for them, which does not impose any memory barriers (which the __sync
functions do) and should therefore be more efficient.

Regards,
Tobias

[1]
http://git.strongswan.org/?p=strongswan.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/atomic-ref