Re: [PATCH 2/3] work_on_cpu: Use our own workqueue.

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Jan 30 2009 - 12:10:28 EST


On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:49:35 +0100 Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> > So we still don't have any non-buggy proposal.
>
> Current upstream code is not pretty (due to the extra workqueue) but not
> buggy either. You'd be right to point out that it is easy to insert a bug
> into it and thus it's not pleasant (more of a workaround than a real fix)
> but if it's outright buggy then please talk up.

OK, so we're not aware of anything in there which will trigger the bug
yet. Although allocate_threshold_blocks() takes about half the locks in
the kernel - it can run an ext3 commit, it does netlink tx, synchronous
process exec, etc.

Why not give up and kill the whole work_on_cpu() thing? afaict the
only caller which cannot be immediately switched to use an IPI is
mce_amd_64's allocate_threshold_blocks(), and it looks like that can be
trivially fixed by moving the entire function except for one rdmsr() up
into the caller.

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