linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 5/5] cpufreq: Get rid of ->governor

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Date:	Wed, 3 Feb 2016 11:05:12 +0000
From:	Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@....com>
To:	Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@...aro.org>
Cc:	Rafael Wysocki <rjw@...ysocki.net>, linaro-kernel@...ts.linaro.org,
	linux-pm@...r.kernel.org, skannan@...eaurora.org,
	peterz@...radead.org, mturquette@...libre.com,
	steve.muckle@...aro.org, vincent.guittot@...aro.org,
	morten.rasmussen@....com, dietmar.eggemann@....com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 5/5] cpufreq: Get rid of ->governor_enabled and its lock

On 03/02/16 11:35, Viresh Kumar wrote:
> On 02-02-16, 16:49, Juri Lelli wrote:
> > There are still paths where we call __cpufreq_governor() without holding
> > policy->rwsem, but those should be fixed with my cleanups (that I intend
> > to refresh and post soon). So, I'm not sure we can safely remove this
> > yet.
> 
> No, we can't.. Though I haven't seen any races from happening even
> after removing it, but it doesn't mean we can't.
> 
> The deal is that, the entire sequence of events needs to be guaranteed
> to happen in a particular order without any other code performing
> similar operations concurrently.
> 
> And so we need to preserve the other sites with proper rwsem locking
> first.
> 

Right. I guess it is what I was trying to do with my cleanups, adding
assertions and fixing paths that didn't verify those.

It should be easy to rebase that set (or a part of it) on top of your
and/or Rafael changes. I realize that there are multiple sets of changes
under discussion; so, please tell me how do you, and Rafael, want to
proceed about this.

> > So, __cpufreq_governor() becomes effectively a wrapper around
> > ->governor() calls and governors are left responsible for implementing
> > the state machine with appropriate checks.
> 
> Not really. The core can now guarantee that the entire sequence
> happens atomically. For example, on governor switch, we need to
> guarantee that STOP/EXIT happen without any intervention for the old
> governor. Or, INIT/START/LIMITS happen without any intervention for
> the new governor, etc..
> 

OK, checking for invalid state transitions (for ondemand and
conservative) is still in done cpufreq_governor.c.

> > Maybe we add a comment somewhere stating exactly how things are meant to
> > work?

But, I guess any other governor that will bypass cpufreq_governor.c, it
will also have to implement such checks. I was just proposing to state
this somewhere, so that we don't forget.

Best,

- Juri