Re: [tip:core/rcu] Revert "rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usagebased on semi-formal proof"

From: Paul E. McKenney
Date: Wed May 25 2011 - 00:53:00 EST


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 05:10:11PM -0700, Yinghai Lu wrote:
> On 05/24/2011 02:23 PM, Yinghai Lu wrote:
> > On 05/23/2011 06:35 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 06:26:23PM -0700, Yinghai Lu wrote:
> >>> On 05/23/2011 06:18 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> OK, so it looks like I need to get this out of the way in order to track
> >>>> down the delays. Or does reverting PeterZ's patch get you a stable
> >>>> system, but with the longish delays in memory_dev_init()? If the latter,
> >>>> it might be more productive to handle the two problems separately.
> >>>>
> >>>> For whatever it is worth, I do see about 5% increase in grace-period
> >>>> duration when switching to kthreads. This is acceptable -- your
> >>>> 30x increase clearly is completely unacceptable and must be fixed.
> >>>> Other than that, the main thing that affects grace period duration is
> >>>> the setting of CONFIG_HZ -- the smaller the HZ value, the longer the
> >>>> grace-period duration.
> >>>
> >>> for my 1024g system when memory hotadd is enabled in kernel config:
> >>> 1. current linus tree + tip tree: memory_dev_init will take about 100s.
> >>> 2. current linus tree + tip tree + your tree - Peterz patch:
> >>> a. on fedora 14 gcc: will cost about 4s: like old times
> >>> b. on opensuse 11.3 gcc: will cost about 10s.
> >>
> >> So some patch in my tree that is not yet in tip makes things better?
> >>
> >> If so, could you please see which one? Maybe that would give me a hint
> >> that could make things better on opensuse 11.3 as well.
> >
> > today's tip:
> >
> > [ 31.795597] cpu_dev_init done
> > [ 40.930202] memory_dev_init done
> >
>
> another boot from tip got:
>
> [ 35.211927] cpu_dev_init done
> [ 136.053698] memory_dev_init done
>
> wonder if you can have clean revert for
>
> commit a26ac2455ffcf3be5c6ef92bc6df7182700f2114
> > Author: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Date: Wed Jan 12 14:10:23 2011 -0800
> >
> > rcu: move TREE_RCU from softirq to kthread
> >
> > If RCU priority boosting is to be meaningful, callback invocation must
> > be boosted in addition to preempted RCU readers. Otherwise, in presence
> > of CPU real-time threads, the grace period ends, but the callbacks don't
> > get invoked. If the callbacks don't get invoked, the associated memory
> > doesn't get freed, so the system is still subject to OOM.
> >
> > But it is not reasonable to priority-boost RCU_SOFTIRQ, so this commit
> > moves the callback invocations to a kthread, which can be boosted easily.
> >
> > Also add comments and properly synchronized all accesses to
> > rcu_cpu_kthread_task, as suggested by Lai Jiangshan.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

There is a new branch yinghai.2011.05.24a on:

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulmck/linux-2.6-rcu.git

Or will be as soon as kernel.org updates its mirrors.

I am not sure I could call this "clean", but it does revert that commit
and 11 of the subsequent commits that depend on it. It does build,
and I will test it once my currently running tests complete.

Thanx, Paul
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