- it avoids taking the lock for many operations (for example
incrementing the counter while it is non-zero);
-- on some platforms, one could implement QemuLockCnt to hold the
- lock and the mutex in a single word, making it no more expensive
+- on some platforms, one can implement QemuLockCnt to hold the lock
+ and the mutex in a single word, making the fast path no more expensive
than simply managing a counter using atomic operations (see
- docs/atomics.txt). This is not implemented yet, but can be
- very helpful if concurrent access to the data structure is
- expected to be rare.
+ docs/atomics.txt). This can be very helpful if concurrent access to
+ the data structure is expected to be rare.
Using the same mutex for frees and writes can still incur some small