Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:23:41 +0200 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Fix dirty page accounting in redirty_page_for_writepage() |
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* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Apr 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > > > c0436275: 64 83 05 20 5f 6a c0 addl $0x1,%fs:0xc06a5f20 > > > > There's no atomic instructions at all - the counters here are > > only accessed locally. They are local-irq-atomic, but not > > cacheline-atomic. > > On other architectures, you need the whole "disable preemption, > load-locked, store-conditional, test-and-loop, enable preemption" > thing. > > Or "disable interrupts, load, store, restore interrupts". > > There really aren't very many architectures that can do almost > unrestricted ALU ops in a single instruction (and thus > automatically safe from preemption and interrupts).
Maybe then what we should do is the very first version of commit 6dbde35308: declaredly make percpu_arith_op() non-irq-atomic (and non-preempt-atomic) everywhere. The commit's internal changelog still says:
* made generic percpu ops atomic against preemption
So we introduced preemption-safety in the v2 version of that commit.
This non-atomicity will 1) either not matter 2) will be irq-atomic by virtue of being within a critical section 3) can be made atomic in the few remaining cases.
And maybe, at most, introduce an opt-in API: percpu_add_irqsafe().
Right?
Ingo
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