Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:19:53 +0200
From: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
To: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Linux Memory Management <linux-mm@kvack.org>, Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>,
       Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk>,
       Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>,
       Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: SPAM: Re: [patch 6/6] mm: fix pagecache write deadlocks
Message-ID: <20061015141953.GC25243@wotan.suse.de>
References: <20061013143516.15438.8802.sendpatchset@linux.site> <20061013143616.15438.77140.sendpatchset@linux.site> <1160912230.5230.23.camel@lappy> <20061015115656.GA25243@wotan.suse.de> <1160920269.5230.29.camel@lappy>
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On Sun, Oct 15, 2006 at 03:51:09PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > Why use raw {inc,dec}_preempt_count() and not
> > > preempt_{disable,enable}()? Is the compiler barrier not needed here? And
> > > do we really want to avoid the preempt_check_resched()?
> > 
> > Counter to intuition, we actually don't mind being preempted here,
> > but we do mind entering the (core) pagefault handler. Incrementing
> > the preempt count causes the arch specific handler to bail out early
> > before it takes any locks.
> > 
> > Clear as mud? Wrapping it in a better name might be an improvement?
> > Or wrapping it into the copy*user_atomic functions themselves (which
> > is AFAIK the only place we use it).
> 
> Right, but since you do inc the preempt_count you do disable preemption,
> might as well check TIF_NEED_RESCHED when enabling preemption again.

Yeah, you are right about that. Unfortunately there isn't a good
way to do this at the moment... well we could disable preempt
around the section, but that would be silly for a PREEMPT kernel.

And we should really decouple it from preempt entirely, in case we
ever want to check for it some other way in the pagefault handler.

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