On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 04:41:30PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 12:46:28AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > Nah, this is more or less what I feared. I just worry people will come
> > around and put WRITE_ONCE() on the other end. I don't think that'll buy
> > us much. Nor do I think the current READ_ONCE()s actually matter.
>
> My friend, you trust compilers more than I ever will. ;-)
Well, we only use the values {0,1,2}, that's contained in the first
byte. Are we saying compiler will not only byte-split but also
bit-split the loads?
But again, lacking the WRITE_ONCE() counterpart, this READ_ONCE() isn't
getting you anything, and if you really worried about it, shouldn't you
have proposed a patch making it all WRITE_ONCE() back when you did this
tasks-rcu stuff?
> > But perhaps put a comment there, that we don't care for the races and
> > only need to observe a 0 once or something.
>
> There are these two passagers in the big lock comment preceding the
> RCU Tasks code:
> // rcu_tasks_pregp_step():
> // Invokes synchronize_rcu() in order to wait for all in-flight
> // t->on_rq and t->nvcsw transitions to complete. This works because
> // all such transitions are carried out with interrupts disabled.
> Does that suffice, or should we add more?
Probably sufficient. If one were to have used the search option :-)
Anyway, this brings me to nvcsw, exact same problem there, except
possibly worse, because now we actually do care about the full word.
No WRITE_ONCE() write side, so the READ_ONCE() don't help against
store-tearing (however unlikely that actually is in this case).
Also, I'm not entirely sure I see why you need on_rq and nvcsw. Would
not nvcsw increasing be enough to know it passed through a quiescent
state? Are you trying to say that if nvcsw hasn't advanced but on_rq is
still 0, nothing has changed and you can proceed?
Or rather, looking at the code it seems use the inverse, if on_rq, nvcsw
must change.
Makes sense I suppose, no point waiting for nvcsw to change if the task
never did anything.
