linux-kernel - Re: get_online_cpus() && workqueues

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Date:	Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:56:49 +0400
From:	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...sign.ru>
To:	Gautham R Shenoy <ego@...ibm.com>
Cc:	Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@...ibm.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Johannes Berg <johannes@...solutions.net>,
	Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@...ibm.com>,
	Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@...ibm.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: get_online_cpus() && workqueues

On 04/28, Gautham R Shenoy wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 06:43:30PM +0400, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> > 
> > Can't we add another nested lock which is dropped right after __cpu_die()?
> > (in fact I think it could be dropped after __stop_machine_run).
> > 
> > The new read-lock is get_online_map() (just a random name for now). The only
> > difference wrt get_online_cpus() is that it doesn't protect against CPU_DEAD,
> > but most users of get_online_cpus() doesn't need this, they only need a
> > stable cpu_online_map and sometimes they need to be sure that some per-cpu
> > object (say, cpu_workqueue_struct->thread) can't be destroyed under this
> > lock.
> > 
> > get_online_map() seem to fit for this, and can be used from work->func().
> > (actually, I think most users of use get_online_cpus() could use the new
> > helper instead, but this doen't matter).
> 
> However, subsystems such as cpufreq require serialization with respect
> to the whole CPU-Hotplug operation since they do initialization and
> cleanup pre and  post the change of the cpu_online_map.
> The current code, or this patch doesn't help in such cases
> when such subsystems have multithreaded workqueues!

Yes, I see, thanks. Heiko has pointed this too.

> One of the thoughts I have is to provide an API along the lines of
> try_get_online_cpus() which will return 1 if there is no CPU Hotplug
> operation in progress and will return 0 otherwise. In case where
> a cpu-hotplug operation is in progress, the workitem could simply
> do nothing other than requeue itself and wait for the cpu-hotplug
> operation to complete.

Yes, possible, but it is not nice that work->func() can't just use
get_online_cpus()...

> Else, we might want to do something like what slab.c does.
> It sets the per-cpu work.func of the cpu-going down to NULL in
> CPU_DOWN_PREPARE.

Yes, but this is different. Please note also that this particular
work must not use get_online_cpus(), no matter what changes we can
make. Otherwise cancel_delayed_work_sync() can deadlock.

What do you think about another patch I sent? I am not happy with it,
and it certainly uglifies cpu.c, but it is simple...

Oleg.

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