Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:31:02 -0700 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: [patch] radix-tree: fix small lockless radix-tree bug |
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On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:03:45 +1000 Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Hi guys, > > Although this doesn't seem like cause for alarm (as per the analysis), > it may still be a good 2.6.26 candidate as we should have a few more > weeks of testing left. > > It should definitely go in -mm with the lockless pagecache patch. > > When shrinking a radix-tree, we do it in a lockless manner by atomically > switching the root pointer away from the redundant node (one that only > has a single entry in the left most slot), and switching it over to its > lone child. > > Because a lockless lookup may have got a reference to the parent and be > in the middle of deciding what to do with it while it is being swapped > away for its child. For this reason, we also have to keep it around and > in a valid state for the lookup to proceed and give a valid result, for > at least an RCU grace period. So we need to keep the child in the left > most slot there in case that is requested by the lookup. > > This is all pretty standard RCU stuff. It is worth repeating because > in my eagerness to obey the radix tree node constructor scheme, I had > broken this by zeroing the radix tree node before the grace period. > > Fix it by clearing those fields in the RCU callback. I would normally > want to rip out the constructor entirely, but radix tree nodes are one > of those places where they make sense (only few cachelines will be > touched soon after allocation). > > > This was never actually observed in any lockless pagecache testing or > using the test harness, but as a rare problem testing my scalable vmap > rewrite. > > Fortunately, it is not a problem anywhere lockless pagecache is used in > mainline kernels (pagecache probe is not a guarantee, and brd does not > have concurrent lookups and deletes). > > However, it would eventually pop up for someone using lockless pagecache :P >
OK, I give up. A cannot spot what you actually changed amongst all the code motion?
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