Subject: Re: [RFC patch] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory
 barrier (v9)
From: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Reply-To: rostedt@goodmis.org
To: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>, Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortel.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org,
       KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>,
       "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
       Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>, mingo@elte.hu,
       laijs@cn.fujitsu.com, dipankar@in.ibm.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org,
       josh@joshtriplett.org, dvhltc@us.ibm.com, niv@us.ibm.com,
       tglx@linutronix.de, peterz@infradead.org, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu,
       dhowells@redhat.com
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Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:25:26 -0500
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On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 11:53 -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

> > It would be very trivial compared to the process-private case. Just IPI
> > all CPUs. It would allow older kernels to work with newer process based
> > apps as they get implemented. But... not a really big deal I suppose.
> 
> This is actually what I did in v1 of the patch, but this implementation met
> resistance from the RT people, who were concerned about the impact on RT tasks
> of a lower priority process doing lots of sys_membarrier() calls. So if we want
> to do other-process-aware sys_membarrier(), we would have to iterate on all
> cpus, for every running process shared memory maps and see if there is something
> shared with all shm of the current process. This is clearly not as trivial as
> just broadcasting the IPI to all cpus.

Right, it may require another syscall or parameter to let the tasks
register a shared page. Then have some mechanism to find a way to
quickly check if a CPU is running a process with that page.

-- Steve


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