Re: irq lock inversion

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Fri Nov 06 2009 - 03:25:20 EST


Hello, Ingo.

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> I havent looked deeply but at first sight i'm not 100% sure that even
> the lock dance hack is safe - doesnt vfree() do TLB flushes, which must
> be done with irqs enabled in general? If yes, then the whole notion of
> using the allocator from irqs-off sections is wrong and the flags
> save/restore is misguided (or at least incomplete).

The only place where any v*() call is nested under pcpu_lock is in the
alloc path, specifically pcpu_extend_area_map() ends up calling
vfree(). pcpu_free() path which can be called from irq context never
calls any vmalloc function directly. The reclaiming is deferred to a
work. Breaking the single nesting completely decouples the two locks
and nobody would be calling vfree() with irq disabled, so I don't
think there will be any problem.

Thanks.

--
tejun
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