linux-stable/Documentation/core-api/index.rst

138 lines
2.4 KiB
ReStructuredText
Raw Normal View History

======================
Core API Documentation
======================
This is the beginning of a manual for core kernel APIs. The conversion
(and writing!) of documents for this manual is much appreciated!
Core utilities
==============
This section has general and "core core" documentation. The first is a
massive grab-bag of kerneldoc info left over from the docbook days; it
should really be broken up someday when somebody finds the energy to do
it.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
kernel-api
workqueue
watch_queue
printk-basics
printk-formats
printk-index
symbol-namespaces
asm-annotations
Data structures and low-level utilities
=======================================
Library functionality that is used throughout the kernel.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
kobject
kref
assoc_array
xarray
Maple Tree: add new data structure Patch series "Introducing the Maple Tree" The maple tree is an RCU-safe range based B-tree designed to use modern processor cache efficiently. There are a number of places in the kernel that a non-overlapping range-based tree would be beneficial, especially one with a simple interface. If you use an rbtree with other data structures to improve performance or an interval tree to track non-overlapping ranges, then this is for you. The tree has a branching factor of 10 for non-leaf nodes and 16 for leaf nodes. With the increased branching factor, it is significantly shorter than the rbtree so it has fewer cache misses. The removal of the linked list between subsequent entries also reduces the cache misses and the need to pull in the previous and next VMA during many tree alterations. The first user that is covered in this patch set is the vm_area_struct, where three data structures are replaced by the maple tree: the augmented rbtree, the vma cache, and the linked list of VMAs in the mm_struct. The long term goal is to reduce or remove the mmap_lock contention. The plan is to get to the point where we use the maple tree in RCU mode. Readers will not block for writers. A single write operation will be allowed at a time. A reader re-walks if stale data is encountered. VMAs would be RCU enabled and this mode would be entered once multiple tasks are using the mm_struct. Davidlor said : Yes I like the maple tree, and at this stage I don't think we can ask for : more from this series wrt the MM - albeit there seems to still be some : folks reporting breakage. Fundamentally I see Liam's work to (re)move : complexity out of the MM (not to say that the actual maple tree is not : complex) by consolidating the three complimentary data structures very : much worth it considering performance does not take a hit. This was very : much a turn off with the range locking approach, which worst case scenario : incurred in prohibitive overhead. Also as Liam and Matthew have : mentioned, RCU opens up a lot of nice performance opportunities, and in : addition academia[1] has shown outstanding scalability of address spaces : with the foundation of replacing the locked rbtree with RCU aware trees. A similar work has been discovered in the academic press https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/rcuvm:asplos12.pdf Sheer coincidence. We designed our tree with the intention of solving the hardest problem first. Upon settling on a b-tree variant and a rough outline, we researched ranged based b-trees and RCU b-trees and did find that article. So it was nice to find reassurances that we were on the right path, but our design choice of using ranges made that paper unusable for us. This patch (of 70): The maple tree is an RCU-safe range based B-tree designed to use modern processor cache efficiently. There are a number of places in the kernel that a non-overlapping range-based tree would be beneficial, especially one with a simple interface. If you use an rbtree with other data structures to improve performance or an interval tree to track non-overlapping ranges, then this is for you. The tree has a branching factor of 10 for non-leaf nodes and 16 for leaf nodes. With the increased branching factor, it is significantly shorter than the rbtree so it has fewer cache misses. The removal of the linked list between subsequent entries also reduces the cache misses and the need to pull in the previous and next VMA during many tree alterations. The first user that is covered in this patch set is the vm_area_struct, where three data structures are replaced by the maple tree: the augmented rbtree, the vma cache, and the linked list of VMAs in the mm_struct. The long term goal is to reduce or remove the mmap_lock contention. The plan is to get to the point where we use the maple tree in RCU mode. Readers will not block for writers. A single write operation will be allowed at a time. A reader re-walks if stale data is encountered. VMAs would be RCU enabled and this mode would be entered once multiple tasks are using the mm_struct. There is additional BUG_ON() calls added within the tree, most of which are in debug code. These will be replaced with a WARN_ON() call in the future. There is also additional BUG_ON() calls within the code which will also be reduced in number at a later date. These exist to catch things such as out-of-range accesses which would crash anyways. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220906194824.2110408-1-Liam.Howlett@oracle.com Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220906194824.2110408-2-Liam.Howlett@oracle.com Signed-off-by: Liam R. Howlett <Liam.Howlett@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org> Tested-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Tested-by: Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com> Tested-by: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com> Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net> Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> Cc: SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org> Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
2022-09-06 19:48:39 +00:00
maple_tree
idr
circular-buffers
rbtree
generic-radix-tree
packing
this_cpu_ops
timekeeping
errseq
wrappers/atomic_t
wrappers/atomic_bitops
Low level entry and exit
========================
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
entry
Concurrency primitives
======================
How Linux keeps everything from happening at the same time. See
Documentation/locking/index.rst for more related documentation.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
refcount-vs-atomic
irq/index
local_ops
padata
../RCU/index
wrappers/memory-barriers.rst
Low-level hardware management
=============================
Cache management, managing CPU hotplug, etc.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
cachetlb
cpu_hotplug
memory-hotplug
genericirq
protection-keys
Memory management
=================
How to allocate and use memory in the kernel. Note that there is a lot
more memory-management documentation in Documentation/mm/index.rst.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
memory-allocation
unaligned-memory-access
dma-api
dma-api-howto
dma-attributes
dma-isa-lpc
mm-api
genalloc
mm/gup: introduce pin_user_pages*() and FOLL_PIN Introduce pin_user_pages*() variations of get_user_pages*() calls, and also pin_longterm_pages*() variations. For now, these are placeholder calls, until the various call sites are converted to use the correct get_user_pages*() or pin_user_pages*() API. These variants will eventually all set FOLL_PIN, which is also introduced, and thoroughly documented. pin_user_pages() pin_user_pages_remote() pin_user_pages_fast() All pages that are pinned via the above calls, must be unpinned via put_user_page(). The underlying rules are: * FOLL_PIN is a gup-internal flag, so the call sites should not directly set it. That behavior is enforced with assertions. * Call sites that want to indicate that they are going to do DirectIO ("DIO") or something with similar characteristics, should call a get_user_pages()-like wrapper call that sets FOLL_PIN. These wrappers will: * Start with "pin_user_pages" instead of "get_user_pages". That makes it easy to find and audit the call sites. * Set FOLL_PIN * For pages that are received via FOLL_PIN, those pages must be returned via put_user_page(). Thanks to Jan Kara and Vlastimil Babka for explaining the 4 cases in this documentation. (I've reworded it and expanded upon it.) Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200107224558.2362728-12-jhubbard@nvidia.com Signed-off-by: John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Reviewed-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com> [Documentation] Reviewed-by: Jérôme Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: Ira Weiny <ira.weiny@intel.com> Cc: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com> Cc: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.ibm.com> Cc: Björn Töpel <bjorn.topel@intel.com> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Cc: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch> Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Cc: Hans Verkuil <hverkuil-cisco@xs4all.nl> Cc: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@mellanox.com> Cc: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@shutemov.name> Cc: Leon Romanovsky <leonro@mellanox.com> Cc: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2020-01-31 06:12:54 +00:00
pin_user_pages
boot-time-mm
gfp_mask-from-fs-io
Interfaces for kernel debugging
===============================
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
debug-objects
tracepoint
debugging-via-ohci1394
Everything else
===============
Documents that don't fit elsewhere or which have yet to be categorized.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
librs
netlink
.. only:: subproject and html
Indices
=======
* :ref:`genindex`