Document the circular buffering capabilities available in Linux.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Reviewed-by: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>
---
Documentation/circular-buffers.txt | 234 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 20 +++
include/linux/circ_buf.h | 4 +
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+ ================
+ CIRCULAR BUFFERS
+ ================
+
+By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
+ Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
+
+
+Linux provides a number of features that can be used to implement circular
+buffering. There are two sets of such features:
+
+ (1) Convenience functions for determining information about power-of-2 sized
+ buffers.
+
+ (2) Memory barriers for when the producer and the consumer of objects in the
+ buffer don't want to share a lock.
+
+To use these facilities, as discussed below, there needs to be just one
+producer and just one consumer. It is possible to handle multiple producers by
+serialising them, and to handle multiple consumers by serialising them.
+
+
+Contents:
+
+ (*) What is a circular buffer?
+
+ (*) Measuring power-of-2 buffers.
+
+ (*) Using memory barriers with circular buffers.
+ - The producer.
+ - The consumer.
+
+
+==========================
+WHAT IS A CIRCULAR BUFFER?
+==========================
+
+First of all, what is a circular buffer? A circular buffer is a buffer of
+fixed, finite size into which there are two indices:
+
+ (1) A 'head' index - the point at which the ...
