Re: [PATCH 0/3] task: Making tasks on the runqueue rcu protected

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 9:50 PM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I have split this work into 3 simple patches, so the code is straight
> forward to review and so that if any mistakes slip in it is easy to
> bisect them.  In the process of review what it takes to remove
> task_rcu_dereference I found yet another user of tasks on the
> runqueue in rcu context; the rcuwait_event code.  That code only needs
> it now unnecessary limits removed.

Looks very good to me.

I think PeterZ is right that the rcu_assign_pointer() in [PATCH 2/3]
could be a RCU_INIT_POINTER() due to condition #3 in the
RCU_INIT_POINTER rules. The initialization of the pointer value simply
has nothing to do with what the pointer points to - we're just
switching it to another case.

That said, it won't affect any of the core architectures much, because
smp_store_release() isn't that expensive (it's just a compiler barrier
on x86, it's a cheap instruction on arm64, and it should be very cheap
on any other architecture too unless they do insane things - even on
powerpc, which is about the worst case for any barriers, it's just an
lwsync).

It might be good to have Paul _look_ at it, and because of the minimal
performance impact I don't worry about it too much if it happens
later, but it should be something we keep in mind.

                  Linus