Re: [RFC][PATCH 12/13] stop_machine: Remove lglock

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 09:14:28AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > To me it just makes more sense to have a single RCU state machine. With
> > expedited we'll push it as fast as we can, but no faster.
> 
> Suppose that someone invokes synchronize_sched_expedited(), but there
> is no normal grace period in flight.  Then each CPU will note its own
> quiescent state, but when it later might have tried to push it up the
> tree, it will see that there is no grace period in effect, and will
> therefore not bother.

Right, I did mention the force grace period machinery to make sure we
start one before poking :-)

> OK, we could have synchronize_sched_expedited() tell the grace-period
> kthread to start a grace period if one was not already in progress.

I had indeed forgotten that got farmed out to the kthread; on which, my
poor desktop seems to have spend ~140 minutes of its (most recent)
existence poking RCU things.

    7 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  56:34.66 rcu_sched
    8 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  20:58.19 rcuos/0
    9 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  18:50.75 rcuos/1
   10 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  18:30.62 rcuos/2
   11 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  17:33.24 rcuos/3
   12 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   2:43.54 rcuos/4
   13 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   3:00.31 rcuos/5
   14 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   3:09.27 rcuos/6
   15 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   2:52.98 rcuos/7

Which is almost as much time as my konsole:

 2853 peterz    20   0  586240 103664  41848 S   1.0  0.3 147:39.50 konsole

Which seems somewhat excessive. But who knows.

> OK, the grace-period kthread could tell synchronize_sched_expedited()
> when it has finished initializing the grace period, though this is
> starting to get a bit on the Rube Goldberg side.  But this -still- is
> not good enough, because even though the grace-period kthread has fully
> initialized the new grace period, the individual CPUs are unaware of it.

Right, so over the weekend -- I had postponed reading this rather long
email for I was knackered -- I had figured that because we trickle the
GP completion up, you probably equally trickle the GP start down of
sorts and there might be 'interesting' things there.

> And they will therefore continue to ignore any quiescent state that they
> encounter, because they cannot prove that it actually happened after
> the start of the current grace period.

Right, badness :-)

Although here I'll once again go ahead and say something ignorant; how
come that's a problem? Surely if we know the kthread thing has finished
starting a GP, any one CPU issuing a full memory barrier (as would be
implied by switching to the stop worker) must then indeed observe that
global state? due to that transitivity thing.

That is, I'm having a wee bit of bother for seeing how you'd need
manipulation of global variables as you elude to below.

> But this -still- isn't good enough, because
> idle CPUs never will become aware of the new grace period -- by design,
> as they are supposed to be able to sleep through an arbitrary number of
> grace periods.

Yes, I'm sure. Waking up seems like a serializing experience though; but
I suppose that's not good enough if we wake up right before we force
start the GP.

> I feel like there is a much easier way, but cannot yet articulate it.
> I came across a couple of complications and a blind alley with it thus
> far, but it still looks promising.  I expect to be able to generate
> actual code for it within a few days, but right now it is just weird
> abstract shapes in my head.  (Sorry, if I knew how to describe them,
> I could just write the code!  When I do write the code, it will probably
> seem obvious and trivial, that being the usual outcome...)

Hehe, glad to have been of help :-)
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