Re: [PATCH -v4 1/2] lib, Make gen_pool memory allocator lockless

[Huang Ying]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 11:57 +0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:03:25 +0800 Huang Ying <ying.huang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > It seems that Steven thinks many architectures without NMI-safe cmpxchg
> > have no real NMI too.
> 
> Could be.
> 
> Really, we should nail this down and work out the matrix of
> what-works-with-what, and then arrange for the things which _won't_
> work to be either non-Kconfigurable or non-compilable.

Yes.  I will try to work out a draft matrix for review firstly.

> The worst thing we could do would be to advertise some code as
> "nmi-safe!!", then to have someone go and use it on that basis, only
> for their users to later discover ghastly rare races.

Yes.

> > In the patch description and comments, it is said that on architectures
> > without NMI-safe cmpxchg, gen_pool can not be used in NMI handler
> > safely.
> > 
> > Or do you think it is better to use a spin_trylock based fallback if
> > NMI-safe cmpxchg is not available? Or require cmpxchg implementation
> > uses spin_trylock instead of spin_lock?
> 
> As a first step, a typical thing to do would be to create
> CONFIG_ARCH_HAVE_NMI_SAFE_CMPXCHG, define that in the appropriate
> architectures, make ftrace and perf and genpool and anything else
> dependent upon that at Kconfig-time.

Yes.  At least lockless list should depend on that.  And we need select
between cmpxchg and spin_trylock_irqsave based on that.

Hi, Peter,

Do you think think irq_work should depend on that?  Or we just
reimplement irq_work based on lockless list and make irq_work depends on
lockless list?

> A spin_trylock_irqsave() implementation would do what?  Rarely fail the
> memory allocation attempt if the trylock failed?  I guess that's
> acceptable in the context of gen_pool, because memory allocators are
> expected to fail, and everyone carefully tests the allocation-failed
> error paths (lol).

Yes.  I will implement the fallback for gen_pool.

> But rare failures may not be useful within the context of future
> clients of the "lockless" list implementation so I'd say that a safer
> approach would be to make the list implementation require
> CONFIG_ARCH_HAVE_NMI_SAFE_CMPXCHG and be done with it.

Yes.

> So that's all pretty simple so far.  However...
> 
> The list implementation is still useful to
> non-CONFIG_ARCH_HAVE_NMI_SAFE_CMPXCHG clients, as long as they aren't
> using it from NMI context, yes?
> 
> In which case I suppose we could add a library of lockless_list_foo()
> functions which are usable from non-NMI contexts and which are
> available to all configs.  And on top of that implement a library of
> nmi_safe_lockless_list_foo() functions which are just wrappers around
> lockless_list_foo(), but which are only available if
> CONFIG_ARCH_HAVE_NMI_SAFE_CMPXCHG=y.
> 
> Which is getting to be a bit of a pain, so you might choose to
> disregard everything after "However..." ;)

At least as the first step, I prefer to just make lockless list depend
on CONFIG_ARCH_HAVE_NMI_SAFE_CMPXCHG.

Best Regards,
Huang Ying


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