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

[Mathieu Desnoyers]

On 2023-11-21 10:52, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 03:46:43PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> > Why is this such a hard question?
>
> Anyway, recapping from IRC:
>
> preemptible, SRCU:
>    counter-array based, GP advances by increasing array index
>    and waiting for previous index to drop to 0.
>
>    notably, a GP can pass while a task is preempted but not within a
>    critical section.
>
>    SRCU has smp_mb() in the critical sections to improve GP.

Also:

preemptible only allows blocking when priority inheritance is
guarantees, which excludes doing I/O, and thus page faults.
Otherwise a long I/O could cause the system to OOM.

SRCU allows all kind of blocking, as long as the entire SRCU
domain does not mind waiting for a while before readers complete.

> tasks:
>    waits for every task to pass schedule()
>
>    ensures that any pieces of text rendered unreachable before, is
>    actually unused after.
>
> tasks-rude:
>    like tasks, but different? build to handle tracing while rcu-idle,
>    even though that was already deemed bad?
>
> tasks-tracing-rcu:
>    extention of tasks to have critical-sections ? Should this simply be
>    tasks?

tasks-trace-rcu is meant to allow tasks to block/take a page fault 
within the read-side. It is specialized for tracing and has a single 
domain. It does not need the smp_mb on the read-side, which makes it 
lower-overhead than SRCU.

Thanks,

Mathieu

> Can someone complete, please?

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
https://www.efficios.com