Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:32:53 -0700
From: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
To: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
Cc: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com, Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@ioremap.net>,
       David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>, kaber@trash.net,
       torvalds@linux-foundation.org, jeff.chua.linux@gmail.com,
       paulus@samba.org, mingo@elte.hu, laijs@cn.fujitsu.com,
       jengelh@medozas.de, r000n@r000n.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       netfilter-devel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org,
       benh@kernel.crashing.org, mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca
Subject: Re: [PATCH] netfilter: use per-cpu recursive lock (v10)
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On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:25:14 +0200
Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com> wrote:

> Stephen Hemminger a écrit :
> > This version of x_tables (ip/ip6/arp) locking uses a per-cpu
> > recursive lock that can be nested. It is sort of like existing kernel_lock,
> > rwlock_t and even old 2.4 brlock.
> > 
> > "Reader" is ip/arp/ip6 tables rule processing which runs per-cpu.
> > It needs to ensure that the rules are not being changed while packet
> > is being processed.
> > 
> > "Writer" is used in two cases: first is replacing rules in which case
> > all packets in flight have to be processed before rules are swapped,
> > then counters are read from the old (stale) info. Second case is where
> > counters need to be read on the fly, in this case all CPU's are blocked
> > from further rule processing until values are aggregated.
> > 
> > The idea for this came from an earlier version done by Eric Dumazet.
> > Locking is done per-cpu, the fast path locks on the current cpu
> > and updates counters.  This reduces the contention of a
> > single reader lock (in 2.6.29) without the delay of synchronize_net()
> > (in 2.6.30-rc2). 
> > 
> > The mutex that was added for 2.6.30 in xt_table is unnecessary since
> > there already is a mutex for xt[af].mutex that is held.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com
> > 
> > ---
> > Changes from earlier patches.
> >   - function name changes
> >   - disable bottom half in info_rdlock
> 
> OK, but we still have a problem on machines with >= 250 cpus,
> because calling 250 times spin_lock() is going to overflow preempt_count,
> as each spin_lock() increases preempt_count by one.

Ok, not that I have one of those.

The problem which lockdep has is that it seems to associate all the
locks with same name.
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