Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] locking/rtqspinlock: Realtime queued spinlocks

[Waiman Long]

On 01/05/2017 11:08 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 10:55:55AM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
>> What I am saying that we don't need to change spinlock to rtmutex in a
>> -RT kernel. Instead, we can use rtqspinlock for this purpose. All the
>> sleeping locks will still be converted to rtmutex.
> No-no-no..
>
>> Conversion of rtmutex does allow forced CPU preemption when there is a
>> need for that. What rtqspinlock can provide is voluntary preemption
>> where the lock waiters explicitly yield the CPU while waiting for the
>> lock. I use the need_resched() to detect if CPU yielding is necessary.
>> However, if the CPU was in a preempt disabled region before the
>> spin_lock() call, we can't yield the CPU. The only way is to raise its
>> priority and try to get the lock ASAP.
> And here you've lost your finger because the saw-blade didn't stop in
> time.

Well, I lost my virtual fingers all the time;-)

This is one way that I learn and become stronger.

> RT very fundamentally relies on the spinlock->rtmutex conversion to
> allow preempting things when a higher priority task comes along. A
> spinlock, of any kind, requires having preemption disabled while holding
> the lock. If the critical section is of unbounded latency, you have
> unbounded preemption latency and RT is no more.
>
> Its not about PI on contention, although that helps inversion scenarios.
> Its about allowing preemption, which fundamentally requires a sleeping
> lock to be used.
>
> Many of the spinlock sections of mainline are not well behaved in an RT
> sense and therefore must not disable preemption. Similar for the IRQ
> disable regions and hence we have the whole threaded interrupt stuff.

I do make the assumption that spinlock critical sections are behaving
well enough. Apparently, that is not a valid assumption. I sent these
RFC patches out to see if it was an idea worth pursuing. If not, I can
drop these patches. Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

Cheers,
Longman