Re: [RFC PATCH] x86 NMI-safe INT3 and Page Fault (v5)

From: Mathieu Desnoyers
Date: Sat Apr 19 2008 - 17:23:24 EST


* Andi Kleen (andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> Mathieu Desnoyers <compudj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >
> > It uses RCU-style updates and has been designed to be lockless from the
> > ground up.
>
> RCU is not necessarily NMI safe. In most cases RCU needs writer locks
> which you cannot do with NMIs.
>
> -Andi
>

RCU-style updates are done outside of NMIs, in sleepable context. That's
just required when the probes connected on markers must be
registered/unregistered.

The NMI context is the RCU read side. It only have to get the probe
function pointers to call along with the private data pointers.

Mathieu


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Mathieu Desnoyers
Computer Engineering Ph.D. Student, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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