On Tue, 2013-06-25 at 16:01 -0700, Tejun Heo wrote: > Hello, Steven. > > On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 06:52:34PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > Now my question is, are those local_irq_*() calls just for synchronizing > > with sched RCU? If so, can you use rcu_read_lock_sched() instead? > > Hmmm... using local_irq_disable/enable() is more consistent as > irq-safe locks are used widely in workqueue. Also, using > rcu_read_lock_sched() would mean that we'll have > spin_lock_irq_save/restore() nested inside preempt_disable/enable(), > which is a bit silly in upstream kernel. Why is that silly? It actually makes plenty of sense. Now if preempt_disable/enable was nested in spin_lock_irq_save/restore() now that would be pretty silly. What I mean is, even in mainline, we want interrupts enable as much as possible, as that will allow devices and such to have their interrupts delivered in a timely manner. If we can get away with just disabling preemption then doing so would be better. That's the point of softirq. We run those with interrupts enabled but preemption disabled, and there's several cases that we disable interrupts in a softirq with spin_lock_irq_save/restore. Just looking at the first part of that function: local_irq_disable(); pool = get_work_pool(work); if (!pool) { local_irq_enable(); return false; } On the case of poll == NULL, we disabled interrupts for no reason. > > That said, both paths you pointed out are rather cold, so I don't > think it'd matter. Please feel free to send a patch with comment > explaining why local irq flipping, which fits better there, isn't > being used. It may take a bit of understanding the code before I send a patch. But I'll start looking into it. Thanks, -- Steve -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rt-users" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html