My Diary (2nd)

The kernel includes a number of library routines for the implementation of useful data structures. Among those are two types of trees: radix trees and red-black trees. This article will have a look at the radix tree API, with red-black trees to follow in the future.

Wikipedia has a radix tree article, but Linux radix trees are not well described by that article. A Linux radix tree is a mechanism by which a (pointer) value can be associated with a (long) integer key. It is reasonably efficient in terms of storage, and is quite quick on lookups. Additionally, radix trees in the Linux kernel have some features driven by kernel-specific needs, including the ability to associate tags with specific entries.

The cheesy diagram on the right shows a leaf node from a Linux radix tree. The node contains a number of slots, each of which can contain a pointer to something of interest to the creator of the tree. Empty slots contain a NULL pointer. These trees are quite broad - in the 2.6.16-rc kernels, there are 64 slots in each radix tree node. Slots are indexed by a portion of the (long) integer key. If the highest key value is less than 64, the entire tree can be represented with a single node. Normally, however, a rather larger set of keys is in use - otherwise, a simple array could have been used. So a larger tree might look something like this:

This tree is three levels deep. When the kernel goes to look up a specific key, the most significant six bits will be used to find the appropriate slot in the root node. The next six bits then index the slot in the middle node, and the least significant six bits will indicate the slot containing a pointer to the actual value. Nodes which have no children are not present in the tree, so a radix tree can provide efficient storage for sparse trees.

Radix trees have a few users in the mainline kernel tree. The PowerPC architecture uses a tree to map between real and virtual IRQ numbers. The NFS code attaches a tree to relevant inode structures to keep track of outstanding requests. The most widespread use of radix trees, however, is in the memory management code. The address_space structure used to keep track of backing store contains a radix tree which tracks in-core pages tied to that mapping. Among other things, this tree allows the memory management code to quickly find pages which are dirty or under writeback.

As is typical with kernel data structures, there are two modes for declaring and initializing radix trees:

The first form declares and initializes a radix tree with the given name; the second form performs the initialization at run time. In either case, a gfp_mask must be provided to tell the code how memory allocations are to be performed. If radix tree operations (insertions, in particular) are to be performed in atomic context, the given mask should be GFP_ATOMIC.

The functions for adding and removing entries are straightforward:

A call to radix_tree_insert() will cause the given item to be inserted (associated with key) in the given tree. This operation may require memory allocations; should an allocation fail, the insertion will fail and the return value will be -ENOMEM. The code will refuse to overwrite an existing entry; if key already exists in the tree, radix_tree_insert() will return -EEXIST. On success, the return value is zero. radix_tree_delete() removes the item associated with key from tree, returning a pointer to that item if it was present.

There are situations where failure to insert an item into a radix tree can be a significant problem. To help avoid such situations, a pair of specialized functions are provided:

This function will attempt to allocate sufficient memory (using the given gfp_mask) to guarantee that the next radix tree insertion cannot fail. The allocated structures are stored in a per-CPU variable, meaning that the calling function must perform the insertion before it can schedule or be moved to a different processor. To that end, radix_tree_preload() will, when successful, return with preemption disabled; the caller must eventually ensure that preemption is enabled again by calling radix_tree_preload_end(). On failure, -ENOMEM is returned and preemption is not disabled.

Radix tree lookups can be done in a few ways:

The simplest form, radix_tree_lookup(), looks for key in the tree and returns the associated item (or NULL on failure). radix_tree_lookup_slot() will, instead, return a pointer to the slot holding the pointer to the item. The caller can, then, change the pointer to associate a new item with the key. If the item does not exist, however, radix_tree_lookup_slot() will not create a slot for it, so this function cannot be used in place of radix_tree_insert().

Finally, a call to radix_tree_gang_lookup() will return up to max_items items in results, with ascending key values starting at first_index. The number of items returned may be less than requested, but a short return (other than zero) does not imply that there are no more values in the tree.

One should note that none of the radix tree functions perform any sort of locking internally. It is up to the caller to ensure that multiple threads do not corrupt the tree or get into other sorts of unpleasant race conditions. Nick Piggin currently has a patch circulating which would use read-copy-update to free tree nodes; this patch would allow lookup operations to be performed without locking as long as (1) the resulting pointer is only used in atomic context, and (2) the calling code avoids creating race conditions of its own. It is not clear when that patch might be merged, however.

The radix tree code supports a feature called "tags," wherein specific bits can be set on items in the tree. Tags are used, for example, to mark memory pages which are dirty or under writeback. The API for working with tags is:

radix_tree_tag_set() will set the given tag on the item indexed by key; it is an error to attempt to set a tag on a nonexistent key. The return value will be a pointer to the tagged item. While tag looks like an arbitrary integer, the code as currently written allows for a maximum of two tags. Use of any tag value other than zero or one will silently corrupt memory in some undesirable place; consider yourself warned.

Tags can be removed with radix_tree_tag_clear(); once again, the return value is a pointer to the (un)tagged item. The function radix_tree_tag_get() will check whether the item indexed by key has the given tag set; the return value is zero if key is not present, -1 if key is present but tag is not set, and +1 otherwise. This function is currently commented out in the source, however, since no in-tree code uses it.

There are two other functions for querying tags:

radix_tree_tagged() returns a non-zero value if any item in the tree bears the given tag. A list of items with a given tag can be obtained with radix_tree_gang_lookup_tag().

In concluding, we can note one other interesting aspect of the radix tree API: there is no function for destroying a radix tree. It is, evidently, assumed that radix trees will last forever. In practice, deleting all items from a radix tree will free all memory associated with it other than the root node, which can then be disposed of normally.