Re: [PATCH v4 1/5] tracing: Introduce faultable tracepoints

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 09:06:18AM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> Task trace RCU fits a niche that has the following set of requirements/tradeoffs:
> 
> - Allow page faults within RCU read-side (like SRCU),
> - Has a low-overhead read lock-unlock (without the memory barrier overhead of SRCU),
> - The tradeoff: Has a rather slow synchronize_rcu(), but tracers should not care about
>   that. Hence, this is not meant to be a generic replacement for SRCU.
> 
> Based on my reading of https://lwn.net/Articles/253651/ , preemptible RCU is not a good
> fit for the following reasons:
> 
> - It disallows blocking within a RCU read-side on non-CONFIG_PREEMPT kernels,

Your counter points are confused, we simply don't build preemptible RCU
unless PREEMPT=y, but that could surely be fixed and exposed as a
separate flavour.

> - AFAIU the mmap_sem used within the page fault handler does not have priority inheritance.

What's that got to do with anything?

Still utterly confused about what task-tracing rcu is and how it is
different from preemptible rcu.