Hi, On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 03:34:36AM +0530, Srivatsa S. Bhat wrote: > Hi, > > > To solve these issues and provide a race-free method to register CPU hotplug > callbacks, this patchset introduces new variants of the callback registration > APIs that don't hold the cpu_add_remove_lock, and exports the > cpu_add_remove_lock via cpu_maps_update_begin/done() for use by various > subsystems. With this in place, the following code snippet will register a > hotplug callback as well as initialize already online CPUs without any race > conditions. > > cpu_maps_update_begin(); > > for_each_online_cpu(cpu) > init_cpu(cpu); > > /* This doesn't take the cpu_add_remove_lock */ > __register_cpu_notifier(&foobar_cpu_notifier); > > cpu_maps_update_done(); >
Couple of comments: Right now, cpu_add_remove_lock is being used to 1) Serialize the cpu-hotplug writers. 2) Serialize accesses to cpu_present/possible_map. 3) Serialize updates to the cpu_chain (the cpu hotplug notifier chain). - This is necessary to ensure that registration of notifiers and invocation of CPU_POST_DEAD notifications don't race with each other. Else we could have used get/put_online_cpus() in register_cpu_notifier() and this patch series wouldn't have been necessary. 4) Bulk cpu-hotplug (disable/enable_non_boot_cpus), but this is a special case of 1). CPU_POST_DEAD notification, is invoked with the cpu_hotplug.lock dropped. This was necessary for subsystems which would be waiting for some other thread to finish some work, and that other thread could invoke get_online_cpus(). If CPU_POST_DEAD notification were issued without dropping the cpu_hotplug.lock, this would lead to a deadlock as the notifier would be left stuck waiting for the thread which is blocked in get_online_cpus(). It was introduced to ensure that multithreaded workqueues can safely use get_online_cpus() [https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/6/29/121]. As of now, only two subsystems use this notification and workqueues is _not_ one of them! * arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mcheck/mce.c:mce_cpu_callback() * drivers/cpufreq/cpufreq.c:cpufreq_cpu_callback() I haven't yet audited these two cases to see if they really need this to be handled in CPU_POST_DEAD or if they can be handled in CPU_DEAD. Also can we have an alternate API, something like cpu_hotplug_register_begin/end() instead of reusing cpu_maps_update_begin/end() for this usage, since in most of the patches that follow, we're not touching the any of the cpu_*_maps! > > > Regards, > Srivatsa S. Bhat > IBM Linux Technology Center -- Thanks and Regards gautham. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/