Message-ID: <1429152365.7039.167.camel@j-VirtualBox>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] sched, timer: Remove usages of ACCESS_ONCE in the
 scheduler
From: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
To: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>, Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
        Mike Galbraith <umgwanakikbuti@gmail.com>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>,
        Preeti U Murthy <preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, hideaki.kimura@hp.com,
        Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <aswin@hp.com>,
        Scott J Norton <scott.norton@hp.com>, jason.low2@hp.com
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 19:46:05 -0700
In-Reply-To: <20150415074601.GC13449@gmail.com>
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Hi Ingo,

On Wed, 2015-04-15 at 09:46 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> > You are correct. Now I'm thinking that the WRITE_ONCE() is not needed,
> > and just a:
> > 
> > 	p->mm->numa_scan_seq = READ_ONCE(p->numa_scan_seq) + 1;
> > 
> > Can be done. But I'm still trying to wrap my head around why this is
> > needed here. Comments would have been really helpful. We should make
> > all READ_ONCE() WRITE_ONCE and obsolete ACCESS_ONCE() have mandatory
> > comments just like we do with memory barriers.
> 
> So the original ACCESS_ONCE() barriers were misguided to begin with: I 
> think they tried to handle races with the scheduler balancing softirq 
> and tried to avoid having to use atomics for the sequence counter 
> (which would be overkill), but things like ACCESS_ONCE(x)++ never 
> guaranteed atomicity (or even coherency) of the update.
> 
> But since in reality this is only statistical sampling code, all these 
> compiler barriers can be removed I think. Peter, Mel, Rik, do you 
> agree?

Though in the read side for accessing things such as numa_scan_seq, we
still want to keep them in order to guarantee that numa_scan_seq is only
loaded once right?

static void task_numa_placement(struct task_struct *p)
{
    ...

    seq = ACCESS_ONCE(p->mm->numa_scan_seq);
    if (p->numa_scan_seq == seq)
        return;
    p->numa_scan_seq = seq;

    ...
}

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