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Date:   Sun, 12 May 2019 23:43:05 -0400
From:   Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>
To:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.ibm.com>
Cc:     linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, rcu@vger.kernel.org,
        Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>,
        Lai Jiangshan <jiangshanlai@gmail.com>,
        Andrea Parri <andrea.parri@amarulasolutions.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] doc/rcu: Correct field_count field naming in examples
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On Wed, May 08, 2019 at 11:16:38AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
[snip]
> > The other example could be dentry look up which uses seqlocks for the
> > RCU-walk case? But that could be too complex. This is also something I first
> > learnt from the paper and then the excellent path-lookup.rst document in
> > kernel sources.
> 
> This is a great example, but it would need serious simplification for
> use in the Documentation/RCU directory.  Note that dcache uses it to
> gain very limited and targeted consistency -- only a few types of updates
> acquire the write-side of that seqlock.
> 
> Might be quite worthwhile to have a simplified example, though!
> Perhaps a trivial hash table where write-side sequence lock is acquired
> only when moving an element from one chain to another?

Here you meant "moving from one chain to another" in the case of
hashtable-resizing right? I could not think of another reason why an element
is moved between 2 hash chains.

I just finished reading the main parts of Josh's relativistic hashtable paper
[1] and it is very cool indeed. The whole wait-for-readers application for
hashtable expansion is so well thought. I am planning to go over more papers
and code and can certainly update this example with a read-mostly hashtable
example as well as you are suggesting. :-)

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc11/tech/final_files/Triplett.pdf

thanks,

 - Joel