On Wed, Oct 02, 2013 at 04:00:20PM +0200, Oleg Nesterov wrote: > And again, even > > for (;;) { > percpu_down_write(); > percpu_up_write(); > } > > should not completely block the readers. Sure there's a tiny window, but don't forget that a reader will have to wait for the gp_state cacheline to transfer to shared state and the per-cpu refcount cachelines to be brought back into exclusive mode and the above can be aggressive enough that by that time we'll observe state == blocked again. So I don't think that in practise a reader will get in. Also, since the write side is exposed to userspace; you've got an effective DoS. So I'll stick to waitcount -- as you can see in the patches I've just posted. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>