Re: [RFC PATCH 18/19] cpufreq: remove transition_lock

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 10:21:31AM -0800, Michael Turquette wrote:
> RCU is absolutely not a magic bullet or elixir that lets us kick off
> DVFS transitions from the schedule() context. The frequency transitions
> are write-side operations, as we invariably touch struct cpufreq_policy.
> This means that the read-side stuff can live in the schedule() context,
> but write-side needs to be kicked out to a thread.

Why? If the state is per-cpu and acquired by RCU, updates should be no
problem at all.

If you need inter-cpu state, then things get to be a little tricky
though, but you can actually nest a raw_spinlock_t in there if you
absolutely have to.