Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 00:13:40 +0300
From: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
To: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
       Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/7] barrier: a scalable synchonisation barrier
Message-ID: <20070131211340.GA171@tv-sign.ru>
References: <20070128115118.837777000@programming.kicks-ass.net> <20070128120509.719287000@programming.kicks-ass.net> <20070128143941.GA16552@infradead.org> <20070128152435.GC9196@elte.hu> <20070131191215.GK2574@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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On 01/31, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 04:24:35PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> > * Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 12:51:21PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > > This barrier thing is constructed so that it will not write in the 
> > > > sync() condition (the hot path) when there are no active lock 
> > > > sections; thus avoiding cacheline bouncing. -- I'm just not sure how 
> > > > this will work out in relation to PI. We might track those in the 
> > > > barrier scope and boost those by the max prio of the blockers.
> > > 
> > > Is this really needed?  We seem to grow new funky locking algorithms 
> > > exponentially, while people already have a hard time understanding the 
> > > existing ones.
> > 
> > yes, it's needed.
> 
> Would it be possible to come up with something common between this primitive
> and the one that Oleg Nesterov put together for Jens Axboe?
> 
> 	http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/11/29/330
> 
> Oleg's approach acquires a lock on the update side, which Peter would
> not want in the uncontended case -- but perhaps there is some way to
> make Oleg's approach be able to safely test both counters so as to
> avoid acquiring the lock if there are no readers.
> 
> Oleg, any chance of this working?  I believe it does, but have not
> thought it through fully.

I think no. From the quick reading, barrier_sync() and qrcu/srcu are
quite different. Consider:

barrier_lock()

				barrier_sync();

barrier_unlock();
				... wake up ...
							barrier_lock();

				schedule again

The last "schedule again" would be a BUG for qrcu/srcu, but probably
it is ok for barrier_sync(). It looks like barrier_sync() is more a
rw semaphore biased to readers.

A couple of minor off-topic notes,

+static inline void barrier_unlock(struct barrier *b)
+{
+       smp_wmb();
+       if (atomic_dec_and_test(&b->count))
+               __wake_up(&b->wait, TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE|TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE, 0, b);

This is wake_up_all(&b->wait), yes? I don't undestans why key == b, it could be NULL.

+static inline void barrier_sync(struct barrier *b)
+{
+       might_sleep();
+
+       if (unlikely(atomic_read(&b->count))) {
+               DEFINE_WAIT(wait);
+               prepare_to_wait(&b->wait, &wait, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE);
+               while (atomic_read(&b->count))
+                       schedule();
+               finish_wait(&b->wait, &wait);
+       }
+}

This should be open-coded wait_event(), but wrong! With the scenario above this
can hang forever! because the first wake_up removes the task from the &b->wait.

Oleg.

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