Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH v4 2/5] locking/rwsem: Protect all writes to owner by WRITE_ONCE | From | Jason Low <> | Date | Mon, 23 May 2016 11:46:21 -0700 |
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On Sat, 2016-05-21 at 09:04 -0700, Peter Hurley wrote: > On 05/18/2016 12:58 PM, Jason Low wrote: > > It should be fine to use the standard READ_ONCE here, even if it's just > > for documentation, as it's probably not going to cost anything in > > practice. It would be better to avoid adding any special macros for this > > which may just add more complexity. > > See, I don't understand this line of reasoning at all. > > I read this as "it's ok to be non-optimal here where were spinning CPU > time but not ok to be non-optimal generally elsewhere where it's > way less important like at init time".
So I think there is a difference between using it during init time and using it here where we're spinning. During init time, initializing the owner field locklessly is normal. No other thread should be concurrently be writing to the field, since the structure is just getting initialized, so there are no surprises there.
Our access of the owner field in this function is special in that we're using a bit of "lockless magic" to read and write to a field that gets concurrently accessed without any serialization. Since we're not taking the wait_lock in a scenario where we'd normally would take a lock, it would be good to have this documented.
> And by the way, it's not just "here" but _everywhere_. > What about reading ->on_cpu locklessly?
Sure, we could also use READ_ONCE when reading ->on_cpu :)
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