Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 01/22] sched: Make non-production PREEMPT cond_resched() help Tasks RCU

[Steven Rostedt]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2018 05:40:00 -0700
"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > I'm confused.. why is having this conditional on TRACEPOINT_BENCHMARK a
> > sane idea?  
> 
> Because the TRACEPOINT_BENCHMARK tests are insane, so a similar
> level of insanity is required to make things work.  Plus having this
> be unconditional would not be good for performance, as 0day has been
> telling me frequently over the past couple of years.

Just for some context. The tracepoint benchmark (which should never be
enabled in any production machine), will start a thread when the
benchmark trace event is enabled. This thread will never exit (until
the trace event is disabled), and does a benchmark loop and constantly
calls "cond_resched()" to allow other tasks to run. The point is, this
thread will never have a quiescent state for task_rcu, unless we tell
rcu that cond_resched() is a quiescent state. But this is only required
because the tracepoint benchmark has this nasty thread, that is only
used for debugging and benchmarking the tracepoint (during development).

I also suggested having a direct call into RCU from the thread to tell
RCU that it entered a quiescent state, but Paul didn't like that idea
as it caused the tracepoint benchmark to call too deep into RCU
internals.

 http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180227153646.GD3777@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


-- Steve