Re: [PATCH 07/17] net: convert sock.sk_refcnt from atomic_t to refcount_t

[Eric Dumazet]

On Wed, 2017-03-22 at 13:25 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 07:03:19PM -0700, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> 
> > Note that we might define two refcount_inc()  : One that does whole
> > tests, and refcount_inc_relaxed() that might translate to atomic_inc()
> > on non debug kernels.
> 
> So you'd want a duplicate interface, such that most code, which doesn't
> care about refcount performance much, can still have all the tests
> enabled.
> 
> But the code that cares about it (and preferably can prove it with
> numbers) can use the other.
> 
> I'm also somewhat hesitant to use _relaxed for this distinction, as it
> has a clear meaning in atomics, maybe _nocheck?
> 
> Also; what operations do you want _nocheck variants of, only
> refcount_inc() ?

I was mostly thinking of points where we were already checking the value
either before or after the atomic_inc(), using some lazy check (a la
WARN_ON(atomic_read(p) == 0) or something like that.

But admittedly we can replace all these by standard refcount_inc() and
simply provide a CONFIG option to turn off the checks, and let brave
people enable this option.