[RFC PATCH 04/10] pipe: Use head and tail pointers for the ring, not cursor and length [ver #2]

[Rasmus Villemoes]

On 30/10/2019 23.16, Ilya Dryomov wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 9:35 PM Rasmus Villemoes
> <linux at rasmusvillemoes.dk> wrote:
>>
>> On 30/10/2019 17.19, Ilya Dryomov wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 11:49 AM David Howells <dhowells at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>  /*
>>>> - * We use a start+len construction, which provides full use of the
>>>> - * allocated memory.
>>>> - * -- Florian Coosmann (FGC)
>>>> - *
>>>> + * We use head and tail indices that aren't masked off, except at the point of
>>>> + * dereference, but rather they're allowed to wrap naturally.  This means there
>>>> + * isn't a dead spot in the buffer, provided the ring size < INT_MAX.
>>>> + * -- David Howells 2019-09-23.
>>>
>>> Hi David,
>>>
>>> Is "ring size < INT_MAX" constraint correct?
>>
>> No. As long as one always uses a[idx % size] to access the array, the
>> only requirement is that size is representable in an unsigned int. Then
>> because one also wants to do the % using simple bitmasking, that further
>> restricts one to sizes that are a power of 2, so the end result is that
>> the max size is 2^31 (aka INT_MAX+1).
> 
> I think the fact that indices are free running and wrap at a power of
> two already restricts you to sizes the are a power of two,

Ah, yes, of course. When reducing indices mod n that may already have
been implicitly reduced mod N, N must be a multiple of n for the result
to be well-defined.

Rasmus