summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Documentation/RCU
AgeCommit message (Collapse)Author
2013-05-02Merge commit '8700c95adb03' into timers/nohzFrederic Weisbecker
The full dynticks tree needs the latest RCU and sched upstream updates in order to fix some dependencies. Merge a common upstream merge point that has these updates. Conflicts: include/linux/perf_event.h kernel/rcutree.h kernel/rcutree_plugin.h Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
2013-04-03nohz: Rename CONFIG_NO_HZ to CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMONFrederic Weisbecker
We are planning to convert the dynticks Kconfig options layout into a choice menu. The user must be able to easily pick any of the following implementations: constant periodic tick, idle dynticks, full dynticks. As this implies a mutual exclusion, the two dynticks implementions need to converge on the selection of a common Kconfig option in order to ease the sharing of a common infrastructure. It would thus seem pretty natural to reuse CONFIG_NO_HZ to that end. It already implements all the idle dynticks code and the full dynticks depends on all that code for now. So ideally the choice menu would propose CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE and CONFIG_NO_HZ_EXTENDED then both would select CONFIG_NO_HZ. On the other hand we want to stay backward compatible: if CONFIG_NO_HZ is set in an older config file, we want to enable CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE by default. But we can't afford both at the same time or we run into a circular dependency: 1) CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE and CONFIG_NO_HZ_EXTENDED both select CONFIG_NO_HZ 2) If CONFIG_NO_HZ is set, we default to CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE We might be able to support that from Kconfig/Kbuild but it may not be wise to introduce such a confusing behaviour. So to solve this, create a new CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON option which gathers the common code between idle and full dynticks (that common code for now is simply the idle dynticks code) and select it from their referring Kconfig. Then we'll later create CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE and map CONFIG_NO_HZ to it for backward compatibility. Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@tilera.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Geoff Levand <geoff@infradead.org> Cc: Gilad Ben Yossef <gilad@benyossef.com> Cc: Hakan Akkan <hakanakkan@gmail.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Cc: Kevin Hilman <khilman@linaro.org> Cc: Li Zhong <zhong@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung.kim@lge.com> Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
2013-03-26Merge branches 'doc.2013.03.12a', 'fixes.2013.03.13a' and ↵Paul E. McKenney
'idlenocb.2013.03.26b' into HEAD doc.2013.03.12a: Documentation changes. fixes.2013.03.13a: Miscellaneous fixes. idlenocb.2013.03.26b: Remove restrictions on no-CBs CPUs, make RCU_FAST_NO_HZ take advantage of numbered callbacks, add callback acceleration based on numbered callbacks.
2013-03-13rcu: Add softirq-stall indications to stall-warning messagesPaul E. McKenney
If RCU's softirq handler is prevented from executing, an RCU CPU stall warning can result. Ways to prevent RCU's softirq handler from executing include: (1) CPU spinning with interrupts disabled, (2) infinite loop in some softirq handler, and (3) in -rt kernels, an infinite loop in a set of real-time threads running at priorities higher than that of RCU's softirq handler. Because this situation can be difficult to track down, this commit causes the count of RCU softirq handler invocations to be printed with RCU CPU stall warnings. This information does require some interpretation, as now documented in Documentation/RCU/stallwarn.txt. Reported-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Tested-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
2013-03-12rcu: Documentation updatePaul E. McKenney
This commit applies a few updates based on a quick review of the RCU documentations. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2013-03-12rcu: Make bugginess of code sample more evidentPaul E. McKenney
One of the code samples in whatisRCU.txt shows a bug, but someone scanning the document quickly might mistake it for a valid use of RCU. Add some screaming comments to help keep speed-readers on track. Reported-by: Nathan Zimmer <nzimmer@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
2012-11-16Merge branches 'urgent.2012.10.27a', 'doc.2012.11.16a', 'fixes.2012.11.13a', ↵Paul E. McKenney
'srcu.2012.10.27a', 'stall.2012.11.13a', 'tracing.2012.11.08a' and 'idle.2012.10.24a' into HEAD urgent.2012.10.27a: Fix for RCU user-mode transition (already in -tip). doc.2012.11.08a: Documentation updates, most notably codifying the memory-barrier guarantees inherent to grace periods. fixes.2012.11.13a: Miscellaneous fixes. srcu.2012.10.27a: Allow statically allocated and initialized srcu_struct structures (courtesy of Lai Jiangshan). stall.2012.11.13a: Add more diagnostic information to RCU CPU stall warnings, also decrease from 60 seconds to 21 seconds. hotplug.2012.11.08a: Minor updates to CPU hotplug handling. tracing.2012.11.08a: Improved debugfs tracing, courtesy of Michael Wang. idle.2012.10.24a: Updates to RCU idle/adaptive-idle handling, including a boot parameter that maps normal grace periods to expedited. Resolved conflict in kernel/rcutree.c due to side-by-side change.
2012-11-16rcu: Add documentation for the new rcuexp debugfs trace filePaul E. McKenney
This commit adds the documentation of the rcuexp debugfs trace file that records statistics for expedited grace periods. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-11-16rcu: Update documentation for TREE_RCU debugfs tracingPaul E. McKenney
This commit updates the tracing documentation to reflect the new format that has per-RCU-flavor directories. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-11-13rcu: Remove list_for_each_continue_rcu()Paul E. McKenney
The list_for_each_continue_rcu() macro is no longer used, so this commit removes it. The list_for_each_entry_continue_rcu() macro should be used instead. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-11-08rcu: Document alternative RCU/reference-count algorithmsPaul E. McKenney
The approach for mixing RCU and reference counting listed in the RCU documentation only describes one possible approach. This approach can result in failure on the read side, which is nice if you want fresh data, but not so good if you want simple code. This commit therefore adds two additional approaches that feature unconditional reference-count acquisition by RCU readers. These approaches are very similar to that used in the security code. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-11-08rcu: Update docs to include kfree_rcu()Kees Cook
Mention kfree_rcu() in the call_rcu() section. Additionally fix the example code for list replacement that used the wrong structure element. Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-10-23rcu: Correct the name of a reference in list of RCU papersDhaval Giani
Trying to go through the history of RCU (not for the weak minded) led me to search for a non-existent paper. Correct it to the actual reference Signed-off-by: Dhaval Giani <dhaval.giani@gmail.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-09-25Merge branches 'bigrt.2012.09.23a', 'doctorture.2012.09.23a', ↵Paul E. McKenney
'fixes.2012.09.23a', 'hotplug.2012.09.23a' and 'idlechop.2012.09.23a' into HEAD bigrt.2012.09.23a contains additional commits to reduce scheduling latency from RCU on huge systems (many hundrends or thousands of CPUs). doctorture.2012.09.23a contains documentation changes and rcutorture fixes. fixes.2012.09.23a contains miscellaneous fixes. hotplug.2012.09.23a contains CPU-hotplug-related changes. idle.2012.09.23a fixes architectures for which RCU no longer considered the idle loop to be a quiescent state due to earlier adaptive-dynticks changes. Affected architectures are alpha, cris, frv, h8300, m32r, m68k, mn10300, parisc, score, xtensa, and ia64.
2012-09-23rcu: Fix CONFIG_RCU_FAST_NO_HZ stall warning messagePaul E. McKenney
The print_cpu_stall_fast_no_hz() function attempts to print -1 when the ->idle_gp_timer is not pending, but unsigned arithmetic causes it to instead print ULONG_MAX, which is 4294967295 on 32-bit systems and 18446744073709551615 on 64-bit systems. Neither of these are the most reader-friendly values, so this commit instead causes "timer not pending" to be printed when ->idle_gp_timer is not pending. Reported-by: Paul Walmsley <paul@pwsan.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-09-23rcu: Document SRCU dead-CPU capabilities, emphasize read-side limitsPaul E. McKenney
The current documentation did not help someone grepping for SRCU to learn that disabling preemption is not a replacement for srcu_read_lock(), so upgrade the documentation to bring this out, not just for SRCU, but also for RCU-bh. Also document the fact that SRCU readers are respected on CPUs executing in user mode, idle CPUs, and even on offline CPUs. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> Reviewed-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
2012-09-23rcu: Adjust debugfs tracing for kthread-based quiescent-state forcingPaul E. McKenney
Moving quiescent-state forcing into a kthread dispenses with the need for the ->n_rp_need_fqs field, so this commit removes it. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2012-07-02rcu: Update documentation to cover call_srcu() and srcu_barrier().Paul E. McKenney
The advent of call_srcu() and srcu_barrier() obsoleted some of the documentation, so this commit brings that up to date. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-04-30rcu: Introduce rcutorture testing for rcu_barrier()Paul E. McKenney
Although rcutorture does invoke rcu_barrier() and friends, it cannot really be called a torture test given that it invokes them only once at the end of the test. This commit therefore introduces heavy-duty rcutorture testing for rcu_barrier(), which may be carried out concurrently with normal rcutorture testing. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcu: Call out dangers of expedited RCU primitivesPaul E. McKenney
The expedited RCU primitives can be quite useful, but they have some high costs as well. This commit updates and creates docbook comments calling out the costs, and updates the RCU documentation as well. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcu: Rework detection of use of RCU by offline CPUsPaul E. McKenney
Because newly offlined CPUs continue executing after completing the CPU_DYING notifiers, they legitimately enter the scheduler and use RCU while appearing to be offline. This calls for a more sophisticated approach as follows: 1. RCU marks the CPU online during the CPU_UP_PREPARE phase. 2. RCU marks the CPU offline during the CPU_DEAD phase. 3. Diagnostics regarding use of read-side RCU by offline CPUs use RCU's accounting rather than the cpu_online_map. (Note that __call_rcu() still uses cpu_online_map to detect illegal invocations within CPU_DYING notifiers.) 4. Offline CPUs are prevented from hanging the system by force_quiescent_state(), which pays attention to cpu_online_map. Some additional work (in a later commit) will be needed to guarantee that force_quiescent_state() waits a full jiffy before assuming that a CPU is offline, for example, when called from idle entry. (This commit also makes the one-jiffy wait explicit, since the old-style implicit wait can now be defeated by RCU_FAST_NO_HZ and by rcutorture.) This approach avoids the false positives encountered when attempting to use more exact classification of CPU online/offline state. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcu: Update stall-warning documentationPaul E. McKenney
Add documentation of CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_VERBOSE, CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_INFO, and RCU_STALL_DELAY_DELTA. Describe multiple stall-warning messages from a single stall, and the timing of the subsequent messages. Add headings. Remove RCU_SECONDS_TILL_STALL_RECHECK because this value is now computed at runtime from RCU_CPU_STALL_TIMEOUT, so that sysfs changes to the timeout value now directly affect the RCU_SECONDS_TILL_STALL_RECHECK value. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcu: Add CPU-stall capability to rcutorturePaul E. McKenney
Add module parameters to rcutorture that induce a CPU stall. The stall_cpu parameter specifies how long to stall in seconds, defaulting to zero, which indicates no stalling is to be undertaken. The stall_cpu_holdoff parameter specifies how many seconds after insmod (or boot, if rcutorture is built into the kernel) that this stall is to start. The default value for stall_cpu_holdoff is ten seconds. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcu: Make documentation give more realistic rcutorture durationPaul E. McKenney
The torture.txt documentation gives an example rcutorture run with a 100-second duration. This is ridiculously short, unless maybe testing a fix for a egregious bug. Use a more-realistic one-hour duration for the example. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcutorture: Permit holding off CPU-hotplug operations during bootPaul E. McKenney
When rcutorture is started automatically at boot time, it might well also start CPU-hotplug operations at that time, which might not be desirable. This commit therefore adds an rcutorture parameter that allows CPU-hotplug operations to be held off for the specified number of seconds after the start of boot. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-02-21rcu: Bring RTFP.txt up to date.Paul E. McKenney
Add publications from 2010 and 2011 to RTFP.txt. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-12-11docs: Additional LWN links to RCU APIKees Cook
Tyler Hicks pointed me at an additional article on RCU and I figured it should probably be mentioned with the others. Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-12-11rcu: Add rcutorture CPU-hotplug capabilityPaul E. McKenney
Running CPU-hotplug operations concurrently with rcutorture has historically been a good way to find bugs in both RCU and CPU hotplug. This commit therefore adds an rcutorture module parameter called "onoff_interval" that causes a randomly selected CPU-hotplug operation to be executed at the specified interval, in seconds. The default value of "onoff_interval" is zero, which disables rcutorture-instigated CPU-hotplug operations. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-12-11rcu: Add rcutorture system-shutdown capabilityPaul E. McKenney
Although it is easy to run rcutorture tests under KVM, there is currently no nice way to run such a test for a fixed time period, collect all of the rcutorture data, and then shut the system down cleanly. This commit therefore adds an rcutorture module parameter named "shutdown_secs" that specified the run duration in seconds, after which rcutorture terminates the test and powers the system down. The default value for "shutdown_secs" is zero, which disables shutdown. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-12-11rcu: Add documentation for raw SRCU read-side primitivesPaul E. McKenney
Update various files in Documentation/RCU to reflect srcu_read_lock_raw() and srcu_read_unlock_raw(). Credit to Peter Zijlstra for suggesting use of the existing _raw suffix instead of the earlier bulkref names. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-12-11rcu: Document failing tick as cause of RCU CPU stall warningPaul E. McKenney
One of lclaudio's systems was seeing RCU CPU stall warnings from idle. These turned out to be caused by a bug that stopped scheduling-clock tick interrupts from being sent to a given CPU for several hundred seconds. This commit therefore updates the documentation to call this out as a possible cause for RCU CPU stall warnings. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-12-11rcu: Track idleness independent of idle tasksPaul E. McKenney
Earlier versions of RCU used the scheduling-clock tick to detect idleness by checking for the idle task, but handled idleness differently for CONFIG_NO_HZ=y. But there are now a number of uses of RCU read-side critical sections in the idle task, for example, for tracing. A more fine-grained detection of idleness is therefore required. This commit presses the old dyntick-idle code into full-time service, so that rcu_idle_enter(), previously known as rcu_enter_nohz(), is always invoked at the beginning of an idle loop iteration. Similarly, rcu_idle_exit(), previously known as rcu_exit_nohz(), is always invoked at the end of an idle-loop iteration. This allows the idle task to use RCU everywhere except between consecutive rcu_idle_enter() and rcu_idle_exit() calls, in turn allowing architecture maintainers to specify exactly where in the idle loop that RCU may be used. Because some of the userspace upcall uses can result in what looks to RCU like half of an interrupt, it is not possible to expect that the irq_enter() and irq_exit() hooks will give exact counts. This patch therefore expands the ->dynticks_nesting counter to 64 bits and uses two separate bitfields to count process/idle transitions and interrupt entry/exit transitions. It is presumed that userspace upcalls do not happen in the idle loop or from usermode execution (though usermode might do a system call that results in an upcall). The counter is hard-reset on each process/idle transition, which avoids the interrupt entry/exit error from accumulating. Overflow is avoided by the 64-bitness of the ->dyntick_nesting counter. This commit also adds warnings if a non-idle task asks RCU to enter idle state (and these checks will need some adjustment before applying Frederic's OS-jitter patches (http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/7/246). In addition, validation of ->dynticks and ->dynticks_nesting is added. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-09-29rcu: Document interpretation of RCU-lockdep splatsPaul E. McKenney
There has been quite a bit of confusion about what RCU-lockdep splats mean, so this commit adds some documentation describing how to interpret them. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Update documentation for additional RCU lockdep functionsPaul E. McKenney
Add documentation for rcu_dereference_bh_check(), rcu_dereference_sched_check(), srcu_dereference_check(), and rcu_dereference_index_check(). Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Not necessary to pass rcu_read_lock_held() to rcu_dereference_protected()Michal Hocko
Since ca5ecddf (rcu: define __rcu address space modifier for sparse) rcu_dereference_check() use rcu_read_lock_held() as a part of condition automatically. Therefore, callers of rcu_dereference_check() no longer need to pass rcu_read_lock_held() to rcu_dereference_check(). Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Simplify quiescent-state accountingPaul E. McKenney
There is often a delay between the time that a CPU passes through a quiescent state and the time that this quiescent state is reported to the RCU core. It is quite possible that the grace period ended before the quiescent state could be reported, for example, some other CPU might have deduced that this CPU passed through dyntick-idle mode. It is critically important that quiescent state be counted only against the grace period that was in effect at the time that the quiescent state was detected. Previously, this was handled by recording the number of the last grace period to complete when passing through a quiescent state. The RCU core then checks this number against the current value, and rejects the quiescent state if there is a mismatch. However, one additional possibility must be accounted for, namely that the quiescent state was recorded after the prior grace period completed but before the current grace period started. In this case, the RCU core must reject the quiescent state, but the recorded number will match. This is handled when the CPU becomes aware of a new grace period -- at that point, it invalidates any prior quiescent state. This works, but is a bit indirect. The new approach records the current grace period, and the RCU core checks to see (1) that this is still the current grace period and (2) that this grace period has not yet ended. This approach simplifies reasoning about correctness, and this commit changes over to this new approach. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Fix RCU's NMI documentationPaul E. McKenney
It has long been the case that the architecture must call nmi_enter() and nmi_exit() rather than irq_enter() and irq_exit() in order to permit RCU read-side critical sections in NMIs. Catch the documentation up with reality. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Catch rcutorture up to new RCU API additionsPaul E. McKenney
Now that the RCU API contains synchronize_rcu_bh(), synchronize_sched(), call_rcu_sched(), and rcu_bh_expedited()... Make rcutorture test synchronize_rcu_bh(), getting rid of the old rcu_bh_torture_synchronize() workaround. Similarly, make rcutorture test synchronize_sched(), getting rid of the old sched_torture_synchronize() workaround. Make rcutorture test call_rcu_sched() instead of wrappering synchronize_sched(). Also add testing of rcu_bh_expedited(). Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Update rcutorture documentationPaul E. McKenney
Update rcutorture documentation to account for boosting, new types of RCU torture testing that have been added over the past few years, and the memory-barrier testing that was added an embarrassingly long time ago. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-09-29rcu: Update documentation to flag RCU_BOOST trace informationPaul E. McKenney
Call out the RCU_TRACE information that is provided only in kernels built with RCU_BOOST. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-06-13doc: fix wrong arch/i386 referencesWanlong Gao
Change all "arch/i386" to "arch/x86" in Documentaion/, since the directory has changed. Also update the files which have changed their filename in the meantime accordingly. Signed-off-by: Wanlong Gao <wanlong.gao@gmail.com> [jkosina@suse.cz: reword changelog] Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2011-05-26rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proofPaul E. McKenney
(Note: this was reverted, and is now being re-applied in pieces, with this being the fifth and final piece. See below for the reason that it is now felt to be safe to re-apply this.) Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb() invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view. In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.) This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in deadlock. The proof is as follows: 1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of its leaf rcu_node's lock. 2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the ->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf node's lock. 3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure. Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node. 4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened before the update of ->completed. 5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp() will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock. If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity. 6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible for invocation. If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy, we will still be in the single critical section. In this case, the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state. On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period. On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp(). The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick per CPU to once per grace period. This was reverted do to hangs found during testing by Yinghai Lu and Ingo Molnar. Frederic Weisbecker supplied Yinghai with tracing that located the underlying problem, and Frederic also provided the fix. The underlying problem was that the HARDIRQ_ENTER() macro from lib/locking-selftest.c invoked irq_enter(), which in turn invokes rcu_irq_enter(), but HARDIRQ_EXIT() invoked __irq_exit(), which does not invoke rcu_irq_exit(). This situation resulted in calls to rcu_irq_enter() that were not balanced by the required calls to rcu_irq_exit(). Therefore, after these locking selftests completed, RCU's dyntick-idle nesting count was a large number (for example, 72), which caused RCU to to conclude that the affected CPU was not in dyntick-idle mode when in fact it was. RCU would therefore incorrectly wait for this dyntick-idle CPU, resulting in hangs. In contrast, with Frederic's patch, which replaces the irq_enter() in HARDIRQ_ENTER() with an __irq_enter(), these tests don't ever call either rcu_irq_enter() or rcu_irq_exit(), which works because the CPU running the test is already marked as not being in dyntick-idle mode. This means that the rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() calls and RCU then has no problem working out which CPUs are in dyntick-idle mode and which are not. The reason that the imbalance was not noticed before the barrier patch was applied is that the old implementation of rcu_enter_nohz() ignored the nesting depth. This could still result in delays, but much shorter ones. Whenever there was a delay, RCU would IPI the CPU with the unbalanced nesting level, which would eventually result in rcu_enter_nohz() being called, which in turn would force RCU to see that the CPU was in dyntick-idle mode. The reason that very few people noticed the problem is that the mismatched irq_enter() vs. __irq_exit() occured only when the kernel was built with CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCKING_API_SELFTESTS. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-05-19Revert "rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proof"Paul E. McKenney
This reverts commit e59fb3120becfb36b22ddb8bd27d065d3cdca499. This reversion was due to (extreme) boot-time slowdowns on SPARC seen by Yinghai Lu and on x86 by Ingo . This is a non-trivial reversion due to intervening commits. Conflicts: Documentation/RCU/trace.txt kernel/rcutree.c Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
2011-05-06rcu: Add forward-progress diagnostic for per-CPU kthreadsPaul E. McKenney
Increment a per-CPU counter on each pass through rcu_cpu_kthread()'s service loop, and add it to the rcudata trace output. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-05-06rcu: add grace-period age and more kthread state to tracingPaul E. McKenney
This commit adds the age in jiffies of the current grace period along with the duration in jiffies of the longest grace period since boot to the rcu/rcugp debugfs file. It also adds an additional "O" state to kthread tracing to differentiate between the kthread waiting due to having nothing to do on the one hand and waiting due to being on the wrong CPU on the other hand. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-05-06rcu: update tracing documentation for new rcutorture and rcuboostPaul E. McKenney
This commit documents the new debugfs rcu/rcutorture and rcu/rcuboost trace files. The description has been updated as suggested by Josh Triplett. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2011-05-06rcu: add callback-queue information to rcudata outputPaul E. McKenney
This commit adds an indication of the state of the callback queue using a string of four characters following the "ql=" integer queue length. The first character is "N" if there are callbacks that have been queued that are not yet ready to be handled by the next grace period, or "." otherwise. The second character is "R" if there are callbacks queued that are ready to be handled by the next grace period, or "." otherwise. The third character is "W" if there are callbacks waiting for the current grace period, or "." otherwise. Finally, the fourth character is "D" if there are callbacks that have been handled by a prior grace period and are waiting to be invoked, or ".". Note that callbacks that are in the process of being invoked are not shown. These callbacks would have been removed from the rcu_data structure's list by rcu_do_batch() prior to being executed. (These callbacks are also not reflected in the "ql=" total, FWIW.) Also, document the new callback-queue trace information. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-05-06rcu: Update RCU's trace.txt documentation for new formatPaul E. McKenney
The trace.txt file had obsolete output for the debugfs rcu/rcudata file, so update it. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-05-06rcu: merge TREE_PREEPT_RCU blocked_tasks[] listsPaul E. McKenney
Combine the current TREE_PREEMPT_RCU ->blocked_tasks[] lists in the rcu_node structure into a single ->blkd_tasks list with ->gp_tasks and ->exp_tasks tail pointers. This is in preparation for RCU priority boosting, which will add a third dimension to the combinatorial explosion in the ->blocked_tasks[] case, but simply a third pointer in the new ->blkd_tasks case. Also update documentation to reflect blocked_tasks[] merge Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
2011-05-06rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proofPaul E. McKenney
Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb() invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view. In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.) This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in deadlock. The proof is as follows: 1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of its leaf rcu_node's lock. 2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the ->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf node's lock. 3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure. Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node. 4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened before the update of ->completed. 5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp() will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock. If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity. 6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible for invocation. If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy, we will still be in the single critical section. In this case, the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state. On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period. On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp(). The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick per CPU to once per grace period. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>