[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2017 09:12:20 +0800
From: "Huang\, Ying" <ying.huang@...el.com>
To: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>, <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
<linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
"Tim Chen" <tim.c.chen@...ux.intel.com>, Shaohua Li <shli@...com>,
Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>,
J�r�me Glisse <jglisse@...hat.com>,
Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@...el.com>,
Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@...el.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH -mm] mm, swap: Fix race between swapoff and some swap operations
Hi, Pual,
"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 01:30:03PM +0800, Huang, Ying wrote:
>> Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org> writes:
>>
>> > On Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:41:38 +0800 "Huang\, Ying" <ying.huang@...el.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> > Why do we need srcu here? Is it enough with rcu like below?
>> >> >
>> >> > It might have a bug/room to be optimized about performance/naming.
>> >> > I just wanted to show my intention.
>> >>
>> >> Yes. rcu should work too. But if we use rcu, it may need to be called
>> >> several times to make sure the swap device under us doesn't go away, for
>> >> example, when checking si->max in __swp_swapcount() and
>> >> add_swap_count_continuation(). And I found we need rcu to protect swap
>> >> cache radix tree array too. So I think it may be better to use one
>> >> calling to srcu_read_lock/unlock() instead of multiple callings to
>> >> rcu_read_lock/unlock().
>> >
>> > Or use stop_machine() ;) It's very crude but it sure is simple. Does
>> > anyone have a swapoff-intensive workload?
>>
>> Sorry, I don't know how to solve the problem with stop_machine().
>>
>> The problem we try to resolved is that, we have a swap entry, but that
>> swap entry can become invalid because of swappoff between we check it
>> and we use it. So we need to prevent swapoff to be run between checking
>> and using.
>>
>> I don't know how to use stop_machine() in swapoff to wait for all users
>> of swap entry to finish. Anyone can help me on this?
>
> You can think of stop_machine() as being sort of like a reader-writer
> lock. The readers can be any section of code with preemption disabled,
> and the writer is the function passed to stop_machine().
>
> Users running real-time applications on Linux don't tend to like
> stop_machine() much, but perhaps it is nevertheless the right tool
> for this particular job.
Thanks a lot for explanation! Now I understand this.
Another question, for this specific problem, I think both stop_machine()
based solution and rcu_read_lock/unlock() + synchronize_rcu() based
solution work. If so, what is the difference between them? I guess rcu
based solution will be a little better for real-time applications? So
what is the advantage of stop_machine() based solution?
Best Regards,
Huang, Ying
Powered by blists - more mailing lists