Re: [PATCH v1 09/25] Documentation: locking: Describe seqlock design and usage

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 22 May 2020 20:01:45 +0200
Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 11:45:31PM +0200, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote:
> > diff --git a/include/linux/seqlock.h b/include/linux/seqlock.h
> > index d35be7709403..2a4af746b1da 100644
> > --- a/include/linux/seqlock.h
> > +++ b/include/linux/seqlock.h
> > @@ -1,36 +1,15 @@
> >  /* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 */
> >  #ifndef __LINUX_SEQLOCK_H
> >  #define __LINUX_SEQLOCK_H
> > +
> >  /*
> > - * Reader/writer consistent mechanism without starving writers. This type of
> > - * lock for data where the reader wants a consistent set of information
> > - * and is willing to retry if the information changes. There are two types
> > - * of readers:
> > - * 1. Sequence readers which never block a writer but they may have to retry
> > - *    if a writer is in progress by detecting change in sequence number.
> > - *    Writers do not wait for a sequence reader.
> > - * 2. Locking readers which will wait if a writer or another locking reader
> > - *    is in progress. A locking reader in progress will also block a writer
> > - *    from going forward. Unlike the regular rwlock, the read lock here is
> > - *    exclusive so that only one locking reader can get it.
> > + * seqcount_t / seqlock_t - a reader-writer consistency mechanism with
> > + * lockless readers (read-only retry loops), and no writer starvation.
> >   *
> > - * This is not as cache friendly as brlock. Also, this may not work well
> > - * for data that contains pointers, because any writer could
> > - * invalidate a pointer that a reader was following.
> > + * See Documentation/locking/seqlock.rst for full description.  
> 
> So I really really hate that... I _much_ prefer code comments to crappy
> documents.

Agreed. Comments are much less likely to bitrot than documents. The
farther away the documentation is from the code, the quicker it becomes
stale.

It's fine to add "See Documentation/..." but please don't *ever* remove
comments that's next to the actual code.

-- Steve