Re: [PATCH RFC 3/5] sched/cpufreq: Fix incorrect RCU API usage

[Peter Zijlstra]

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.