Re: WARNING: suspicious RCU usage - sdhci-pltfm: SDHCI platform and OF driver helper

[Ulf Hansson]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2020 at 15:52, Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 08:49:11AM +0200, Ulf Hansson wrote:
> > On Tue, 1 Sep 2020 at 17:00, Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> [ . . . ]
>
> > > Here is the list, though it is early in the morning here:
> > >
> > > 1.      RCU_NONIDLE().
> > >
> > > 2.      Peter's patch, if it turns out to hoist your code out of what
> > >         RCU considers to be the idle loop.
> > >
> > > 3.      If the problem is trace events, use the _rcuidle() variant of the
> > >         trace event.  Instead of trace_blah(), use trace_blah_rcuidle().
> > >
> > > 4.      Switch from RCU (as in rcu_read_lock()) to SRCU (as in
> > >         srcu_read_lock()).
> > >
> > > 5.      Take Peter's patch a step further, moving the rcu_idle_enter()
> > >         and rcu_idle_exit() calls as needed.  But please keep in mind
> > >         that these two functions require that irqs be disabled by their
> > >         callers.
> > >
> > > 6.      If RCU_NONIDLE() in inconvenient due to early exits and such,
> > >         you could use the rcu_irq_enter_irqson() and rcu_irq_exit_irqson()
> > >         functions that it calls.
> > >
> > > Do any of those help?
> >
> > Yes, they will, in one way or the other. Thanks for providing me with
> > all the available options.
> >
> > BTW, I still don't get what good rcu_idle_enter|exit() does, but I am
> > assuming those need to be called at some point before the CPU goes to
> > sleep.
>
> These functions allow RCU to leave idle CPUs undisturbed.  If they
> were not invoked, RCU would periodically IPI idle CPUs to verify that
> there were no RCU readers running on them.  This would be quite bad for
> battery lifetime, among other things.  So the call to rcu_idle_enter()
> tells RCU that it may safely completely ignore this CPU until its next
> call to rcu_idle_exit().

Alright, thanks for explaining this, much appreciated.

So in one way, we would also like to call rcu_idle_enter(), as soon as
we know there is no need for the RCU to be active. To prevent
unnecessary IPIs I mean. :-)

Kind regards
Uffe