spl (Unix)
spl (short for set priority level, after the PDP-11 assembler instruction of the same name[1]) is the name for a collection of Unix kernel routines or macros used to change the interrupt priority level.[2][3] This was historically needed to synchronize critical sections of kernel code that should not be interrupted.[4] Newer Unix variants which support symmetric multiprocessing now mostly use mutexes for this purpose, which is a more general solution, so multiple processors can execute kernel code at the same time.[5][1]
On older PDP-11 versions of Unix, there were eight of these routines, ranging from spl0 to spl7, each corresponding to one PDP-11 interrupt priority level,[3] in addition to splx, which restores a previous priority level (returned by one of the other routines).[2] On BSD Unix and its derivatives, these are called splhigh, splserial, splsched, splclock, splstatclock, splvm, spltty, splsofttty, splnet, splbio, splsoftnet, splsoftclock, spllowersoftclock, spl0, and splx.[2]
(As of March 2019), the spl family of primitives is still heavily used in OpenBSD[6] and NetBSD,[7] which is evidenced by the plentiful calls to splnet() within the networking code;[6][7] whereas FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD use more modern concepts; for example, in DragonFly, LWKT tokens may be used in place of spl.
See also
- IRQL
- Interrupt
- Interrupt priority level
- Programmable Interrupt Controller
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lehey, Greg (2001), Improving the FreeBSD SMP implementation, http://www.lemis.com/grog/SMPng/USENIX/, retrieved 11 May 2018
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "spl(9) - OpenBSD manual pages". https://man.openbsd.org/spl.9.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lions, John (1976). Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code. p. 43.
- ↑ Lions, John (1976). Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code. p. 41.
- ↑ McKusick, Marshall Kirk (2004). The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. Addison-Wesley. p. 93.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "/sys/net/if.c". OpenBSD. 2019-03-01. http://bxr.su/o/sys/net/if.c. "s = splnet();"
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "/sys/net/if.c". NetBSD. 2019-03-01. http://bxr.su/n/sys/net/if.c. "s = splnet();"
 |  |
