On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 1:49 AM, Andy Lutomirski <l...@amacapital.net> wrote: > This is a bit late, but here goes anyway. > > Having played with the x86 context tracking hooks for awhile, I think > it would be nice if core code that needs to be aware of CPU context > (kernel, user, idle, guest, etc) could come up with single, > comprehensible, easily validated set of hooks that arch code is > supposed to call. > > Currently we have: > > - RCU hooks, which come in a wide variety to notify about IRQs, NMIs, etc. > > - Context tracking hooks. Only used by some arches. Calling these > calls the RCU hooks for you in most cases. They have weird > interactions with interrupts and they're slow. > > - vtime. Beats the heck out of me. > > - Whatever deferred things Christoph keeps reminding us about. > > Honestly, I don't fully understand what all these hooks are supposed > to do, nor do I care all that much. From my perspective, the code > code should be able to do whatever it wants and rely on appropriate > notifications from arch code. It would be great if we could come up > with something straightforward that covers everything. For example: > > user_mode_to_kernel_mode() > kernel_mode_to_user_mode() > kernel_mode_to_guest_mode() > in_a_periodic_tick() > starting_nmi() > ending_nmi() > may_i_turn_off_ticks_right_now() > or, better yet: > i_am_turning_off_ticks_right_now_and_register_your_own_darned_hrtimer_if_thats_a_problem() > > Some arches may need: > > i_am_lame_and_forgot_my_previous_context() > > x86 will soon (4.3 or 4.4, depending on how my syscall cleanup goes) > no longer need that. > > Paul says that some arches need something that goes straight from IRQ > to user mode (?) -- sigh. > > etc. > > It might make sense to get enough people who understand what's going > on behind the scenes together to hash out the requirements. >
I am also interested by the topic. I hope we can find out a common infrastructure to handle these callbacks. I am interested in optimizing/simplifying the these callbacks of RCU as well. Thanks, Lai > --Andy > _______________________________________________ > Ksummit-discuss mailing list > ksummit-disc...@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-discuss -- 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/