linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/6] Optimize the cpu hotplug locking -v2

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Date:	Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:00:16 -0700
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
	"Srivatsa S. Bhat" <srivatsa.bhat@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Paul McKenney <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>, Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] Optimize the cpu hotplug locking -v2

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org> wrote:
>
> There's places in the kernel that does for_each_cpu() that I'm sure you
> don't want to disable preemption for. Especially when you start having
> 4096 CPU machines!

We could _easily_ add preemption points in for_each_cpu() for the
MAX_SMP case. We can even do it in the macro itself.

So I wouldn't worry about things like that. I'd expect the "Oh damn,
we have to allocate" case to be more painful, but I think that is
fairly easily handled by having something like a "redo_cpu()" macro
that you can call inside for_each_cpu(). So the pattern for the
(nopefully-not-all-that-common) thing would be something like

   sometype *prealloc = NULL;

   for_each_cpu() {
         if (!prealloc) {
               rcu_read_unlock();  // Or whatever we want to call it
               prealloc = kmalloc(..);
               rcu_read_lock();
               redo_cpu();
          }
   }
   kfree(prealloc);

which is certainly more work than a sleeping lock is, but this looks
like a initialization pattern.

Looking at the things that are actually performance-critical, they
tend to be things like "gather all the statistics for all CPUs".

Honesty in advertizing: I only grepped a couple of users of
get_online_cpus(), and they all seemed like they'd be perfectly happy
with preemption-off. But maybe I was just lucky in my few samples: I
have anecdotes, not data.

              Linus
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