Re: RCU use of swait

From: Joel Fernandes
Date: Wed Mar 18 2020 - 20:47:33 EST


On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 3:11 AM Sebastian Andrzej Siewior
<bigeasy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 2020-03-04 16:35:26 [-0800], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > Hello!
> Hi Paul,
>
> > Or is there some other reason why {S,}RCU needs to use swait that I
> > am forgetting?
>
> swait can be used in hardirq-context (on RT) that is in a section within
> local_irq_save() / raw_spin_lock() and so.
> wait on the hand uses spinlock_t which can not be used in this context.
> So if you have no users which fall into that category then you could
> move back to wait.h.

In RCU, there are some truly-atomic code sections containing an
swake_upXX() call, which would be considered atomic also on
PREEMPT_RT, one example is:

rcu_core() contains an local_irq_{save,restore}() section.

/* No grace period and unregistered callbacks? */
if (!rcu_gp_in_progress() &&
rcu_segcblist_is_enabled(&rdp->cblist) && !offloaded) {
local_irq_save(flags);
if (!rcu_segcblist_restempty(&rdp->cblist, RCU_NEXT_READY_TAIL))
rcu_accelerate_cbs_unlocked(rnp, rdp);
local_irq_restore(flags);
}

And rcu_accelerate_cbs_unlocked(rnp, rdp) calls rcu_gp_kthread_wake()
which does an swake_up_one(), so I think we will have to leave it as
swake_up() the way it is.

thanks,

- Joel