netdev - Re: [PATCH 2/2] rhashtable: improve rhashtable_walk stability when stop/start used.

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Date:   Thu, 29 Mar 2018 13:50:20 +0800
From:   Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>
To:     NeilBrown <neilb@...e.com>
Cc:     Thomas Graf <tgraf@...g.ch>, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] rhashtable: improve rhashtable_walk stability when
 stop/start used.

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 12:19:10PM +1100, NeilBrown wrote:
> When a walk of an rhashtable is interrupted with rhastable_walk_stop()
> and then rhashtable_walk_start(), the location to restart from is based
> on a 'skip' count in the current hash chain, and this can be incorrect
> if insertions or deletions have happened.  This does not happen when
> the walk is not stopped and started as iter->p is a placeholder which
> is safe to use while holding the RCU read lock.
> 
> In rhashtable_walk_start() we can revalidate that 'p' is still in the
> same hash chain.  If it isn't then the current method is still used.
> 
> With this patch, if a rhashtable walker ensures that the current
> object remains in the table over a stop/start period (possibly by
> elevating the reference count if that is sufficient), it can be sure
> that a walk will not miss objects that were in the hashtable for the
> whole time of the walk.
> 
> rhashtable_walk_start() may not find the object even though it is
> still in the hashtable if a rehash has moved it to a new table.  In
> this case it will (eventually) get -EAGAIN and will need to proceed
> through the whole table again to be sure to see everything at least
> once.
> 
> Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@...e.com>

Very nice!

Acked-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt