linux-stable/Documentation/RCU
Paul E. McKenney 3e31009898 rcu: Defer reporting RCU-preempt quiescent states when disabled
This commit defers reporting of RCU-preempt quiescent states at
rcu_read_unlock_special() time when any of interrupts, softirq, or
preemption are disabled.  These deferred quiescent states are reported
at a later RCU_SOFTIRQ, context switch, idle entry, or CPU-hotplug
offline operation.  Of course, if another RCU read-side critical
section has started in the meantime, the reporting of the quiescent
state will be further deferred.

This also means that disabling preemption, interrupts, and/or
softirqs will act as an RCU-preempt read-side critical section.
This is enforced by checking preempt_count() as needed.

Some special cases must be handled on an ad-hoc basis, for example,
context switch is a quiescent state even though both the scheduler and
do_exit() disable preemption.  In these cases, additional calls to
rcu_preempt_deferred_qs() override the preemption disabling.  Similar
logic overrides disabled interrupts in rcu_preempt_check_callbacks()
because in this case the quiescent state happened just before the
corresponding scheduling-clock interrupt.

In theory, this change lifts a long-standing restriction that required
that if interrupts were disabled across a call to rcu_read_unlock()
that the matching rcu_read_lock() also be contained within that
interrupts-disabled region of code.  Because the reporting of the
corresponding RCU-preempt quiescent state is now deferred until
after interrupts have been enabled, it is no longer possible for this
situation to result in deadlocks involving the scheduler's runqueue and
priority-inheritance locks.  This may allow some code simplification that
might reduce interrupt latency a bit.  Unfortunately, in practice this
would also defer deboosting a low-priority task that had been subjected
to RCU priority boosting, so real-time-response considerations might
well force this restriction to remain in place.

Because RCU-preempt grace periods are now blocked not only by RCU
read-side critical sections, but also by disabling of interrupts,
preemption, and softirqs, it will be possible to eliminate RCU-bh and
RCU-sched in favor of RCU-preempt in CONFIG_PREEMPT=y kernels.  This may
require some additional plumbing to provide the network denial-of-service
guarantees that have been traditionally provided by RCU-bh.  Once these
are in place, CONFIG_PREEMPT=n kernels will be able to fold RCU-bh
into RCU-sched.  This would mean that all kernels would have but
one flavor of RCU, which would open the door to significant code
cleanup.

Moving to a single flavor of RCU would also have the beneficial effect
of reducing the NOCB kthreads by at least a factor of two.

Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
[ paulmck: Apply rcu_read_unlock_special() preempt_count() feedback
  from Joel Fernandes. ]
[ paulmck: Adjust rcu_eqs_enter() call to rcu_preempt_deferred_qs() in
  response to bug reports from kbuild test robot. ]
[ paulmck: Fix bug located by kbuild test robot involving recursion
  via rcu_preempt_deferred_qs(). ]
2018-08-30 16:02:34 -07:00
..
Design rcu: Defer reporting RCU-preempt quiescent states when disabled 2018-08-30 16:02:34 -07:00
00-INDEX rcu: Remove debugfs tracing 2017-06-08 18:52:43 -07:00
arrayRCU.txt documentation: RCU-protected array indexes no longer supported 2015-05-27 12:56:17 -07:00
checklist.txt doc: Update RCU documentation 2017-08-17 07:29:48 -07:00
listRCU.txt rcu: Update docs to include kfree_rcu() 2012-11-08 11:44:25 -08:00
lockdep-splat.txt kthread: kthread worker API cleanup 2016-10-11 15:06:33 -07:00
lockdep.txt documentation: RCU-protected array indexes no longer supported 2015-05-27 12:56:17 -07:00
NMI-RCU.txt rcu: Fix RCU's NMI documentation 2011-09-28 21:36:44 -07:00
rcu.txt doc: Update RCU documentation 2017-08-17 07:29:48 -07:00
rcu_dereference.txt doc: De-emphasize smp_read_barrier_depends 2017-12-05 11:57:53 -08:00
rcubarrier.txt doc: Update RCU documentation 2017-08-17 07:29:48 -07:00
rculist_nulls.txt mm: Rename SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU to SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU 2017-04-18 11:42:36 -07:00
rcuref.txt documentation: Add pointer to percpu-ref for RCU and refcount 2014-07-08 08:32:56 -07:00
RTFP.txt Documentation: fix common spelling mistakes 2016-04-28 07:51:59 -06:00
stallwarn.txt doc: Update RCU CPU stall-warning documentation 2018-07-12 15:38:51 -07:00
torture.txt doc: Update RCU documentation 2017-08-17 07:29:48 -07:00
UP.txt
whatisRCU.txt rculist: Improve documentation for list_for_each_entry_from_rcu() 2018-07-12 15:39:25 -07:00