Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 02/15] rcu: Use timer as backstop for NOCB deferred wakeups

[Steven Rostedt]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2017 12:18:14 -0700
"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 02:12:20PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 14:44:31 -0700
> > "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >   
> > > The handling of RCU's no-CBs CPUs has a maintenance headache, namely
> > > that if call_rcu() is invoked with interrupts disabled, the rcuo kthread
> > > wakeup must be defered to a point where we can be sure that scheduler
> > > locks are not held.  Of course, there are a lot of code paths leading
> > > from an interrupts-disabled invocation of call_rcu(), and missing any
> > > one of these can result in excessive callback-invocation latency, and
> > > potentially even system hangs.  
> > 
> > What about using irq_work? That's what perf and ftrace use for such a
> > case.  
> 
> I hadn't looked at irq_work before, thank you for the pointer!
> 
> I nevertheless believe that timers work better in this particular case
> because they can be cancelled (which appears to be the common case), they

Is the common case here that it doesn't trigger? That is, the
del_timer() will be called?

> normally are not at all time-critical, and because running in softirq
> is just fine -- no need to run out of the scheduling-clock interrupt.

irq_work doesn't always use the scheduling clock. IIRC, it will simply
trigger a interrupt (if the arch supports it), and the work will be
done when interrupts are enabled (the interrupt that will do the work
will trigger)

> 
> Seem reasonable?

Don't know. With irq_work, you just call it and forget about it. No
need to mod or del timers.

-- Steve