On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 04:31:17PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 10:21:39AM -0500, Joel Fernandes wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 10:18:05AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > > On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 12:49:40AM -0500, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote: > > > > @@ -34,8 +34,12 @@ void cpufreq_add_update_util_hook(int cpu, struct update_util_data *data, > > > > if (WARN_ON(!data || !func)) > > > > return; > > > > > > > > - if (WARN_ON(per_cpu(cpufreq_update_util_data, cpu))) > > > > + rcu_read_lock(); > > > > + if (WARN_ON(rcu_dereference(per_cpu(cpufreq_update_util_data, cpu)))) { > > > > + rcu_read_unlock(); > > > > return; > > > > + } > > > > + rcu_read_unlock(); > > > > > > > > data->func = func; > > > > rcu_assign_pointer(per_cpu(cpufreq_update_util_data, cpu), data); > > > > > > This doesn't make any kind of sense to me. > > > > > > > As per the rcu_assign_pointer() line, I inferred that > > cpufreq_update_util_data is expected to be RCU protected. Reading the pointer > > value of RCU pointers generally needs to be done from RCU read section, and > > using rcu_dereference() (or using rcu_access()). > > > > In this patch, I changed cpufreq_update_util_data to be __rcu annotated to > > avoid the sparse error thrown by rcu_assign_pointer(). > > > > Instead of doing that, If your intention here is RELEASE barrier, should I > > just replace in this function: > > rcu_assign_pointer(per_cpu(cpufreq_update_util_data, cpu), data); > > with: > > smp_store_release(per_cpu(cpufreq_update_util_data, cpu), data)) > > ? > > > > It would be nice IMO to be explicit about the intention of release/publish > > semantics by using smp_store_release(). > > No, it is RCU managed, it should be RCU. The problem is that the hunk > above is utter crap. > > All that does is read the pointer, it never actually dereferences it. For whatever it is worth, in that case it could use rcu_access_pointer(). And this primitive does not do the lockdep check for being within an RCU read-side critical section. As Peter says, if there is no dereferencing, there can be no use-after-free bug, so the RCU read-side critical is not needed. Good eyes, Peter! ;-) Thanx, Paul