Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:24:04 -0700 | Subject | Re: [PATCH 06/11] rwsem: wake queued readers when writer blocks on active read lock | From | Tony Luck <> |
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On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com> wrote: > This change addresses the following situation: > > - Thread A acquires the rwsem for read > - Thread B tries to acquire the rwsem for write, notices there is already > an active owner for the rwsem. > - Thread C tries to acquire the rwsem for read, notices that thread B already > tried to acquire it. > - Thread C grabs the spinlock and queues itself on the wait queue. > - Thread B grabs the spinlock and queues itself behind C. At this point A is > the only remaining active owner on the rwsem. > > In this situation thread B could notice that it was the last active writer > on the rwsem, and decide to wake C to let it proceed in parallel with A > since they both only want the rwsem for read. > > Signed-off-by: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Linus tree this morning[1] was behaving badly on ia64 ... processes would wander off into some unkillable state ... and since this happened to processes starting from rc*.d I couln't get the system up to a login prompt. System is a 32-way (4 sockets * quad-core * hyperthread).
git bisect pins the blame on this change (commit 424acaaeb...). Reverting it (and it's successor a8618a0e - because I assumed that it depended on 424...) gives me a kernel that works fine.
Not sure what is wrong with this change. Maybe ia64 needs some more memory ordering bits than the changed code provides? I can dig into it a bit harder tomorrow, but I thought you'd like an early heads-up in case anyone else is seeing similar problems.
-Tony
[1] N.B. I've been on vacation - so this morning's tree was the first I'd tried since 2.6.35 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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