Re: [PATCH net] tcp: Add READ_ONCE() to read tcp_orphan_count

[Eric Dumazet]

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 4:10 PM Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 02:31:48PM -0700, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 2:18 PM Marco Elver <elver@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I guess the question is, is it the norm that per_cpu() retrieves data
> > > that can legally be modified concurrently, or not. If not, and in most
> > > cases it's a bug, the annotations should be here.
> > >
> > > Paul, was there any guidance/documentation on this, but I fail to find
> > > it right now? (access-marking.txt doesn't say much about per-CPU
> > > data.)
> >
> > Normally, whenever we add a READ_ONCE(), we are supposed to add a comment.
>
> I am starting to think that comments are even more necessary for unmarked
> accesses to shared variables, with the comments setting out why the
> compiler cannot mess things up.  ;-)
>
> > We could make an exception for per_cpu_once(), because the comment
> > would be centralized
> > at per_cpu_once() definition.
>
> This makes a lot of sense to me.
>
> > We will be stuck with READ_ONCE() in places we are using
> > per_cpu_ptr(), for example
> > in dev_fetch_sw_netstats()
>
> If this is strictly statistics, data_race() is another possibility.
> But it does not constrain the compiler at all.

Statistics are supposed to be monotonically increasing ;)

Some SNMP agents would be very confused if they could observe 'garbage' there.

I sense that we are going to add thousands of READ_ONCE() soon :/