Re: [PATCH 1/2] regmap: teach regmap to use raw spinlocks if requested in the config

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Wed, Sep 01 2021 at 17:05, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 04:16:04PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 30 2021 at 13:19, Mark Brown wrote:
>
>> > That probably does make sense, I think we're just using regular
>> > spinlocks for spinlocks mainly because they're the default rather
>> > than because anyone put huge amounts of thought into it.  IIRC
>> > the first users were using spinlocks for their locking when they
>> > were converted.
>
>> So if the actual spinlock protected operations are not doing any other
>> business than accessing preallocated cache memory and a few MMIO
>> operations then converting them to raw spinlocks should have no real
>> impact on RT.
>
> I think Vladimir's point that something might try to use one of the APIs
> that can do multiple register writes atomically to generate a very long
> register write sequence is valid here.  It's far from the common case
> but it'd be hard to audit, it's going to be a lot easier to handle going
> to raw spinlocks in the cases where it's specifically needed than to
> keep on top of ensuring that none of the users are causing issues or
> start causing issues in the future.  This does make me feel it's a bit
> safer to leave the default the way it is since if you get it wrong then
> lockdep will tend to notice very quickly while it's less likely that
> we'd get tooling spotting issues the other way around.

Fair enough.

>> One way to do that is obviously starting with the patch from Vladimir
>> and then convert them one by one, so the assumption that they are not
>> doing anything nasty (in the RT sense) can be validated.
>
> Vladimir's patch is in Linus' tree now so users that can safely do so
> can start using raw spinlocks.

ok