Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 1/1] Tiny RCU changes for 3.9

[Josh Triplett]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2013 at 08:57:48AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 07, 2013 at 07:58:10AM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 05, 2013 at 09:50:59AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > rcu: Provide RCU CPU stall warnings for tiny RCU
> > > 
> > > Tiny RCU has historically omitted RCU CPU stall warnings in order to
> > > reduce memory requirements, however, lack of these warnings caused Thomas
> > > Gleixner some debugging pain recently.  Therefore, this commit adds RCU
> > > CPU stall warnings to tiny RCU if RCU_TRACE=y.  This keeps the memory
> > > footprint small, while still enabling CPU stall warnings in kernels
> > > built to enable them.
> > > 
> > > This is still a bit on the high-risk side, so running this will likely
> > > be a debugging exercise.
> > > 
> > > Reported-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > Did you generate this patch with something other than git?  The
> > formatting seems a bit off: it doesn't have a diffstat or the usual
> > "---" line between the commit message and the patch.
> 
> Indeed I did -- couldn't see the point of sending a 0/1 and 1/1
> series of patches.  ;-)

Just don't pass --cover-letter to git format-patch and you won't get the
0/1.

> > This patch seems reasonable to me, but the repeated use of #if
> > defined(CONFIG_SMP) || defined(CONFIG_RCU_TRACE) seems somewhat
> > annoying, and fragile if you ever decide to change the conditions.  How
> > about defining an appropriate symbol in Kconfig for stall warnings, and
> > using that?
> 
> But I only just removed the config option for SMP RCU stall warnings.  ;-)
> 
> But I must agree that "defined(CONFIG_SMP) || defined(CONFIG_RCU_TRACE)"
> is a bit obscure.  The rationale is that RCU stall warnings are
> unconditionally enabled in SMP kernels, but don't want to be in
> TINY_RCU kernels due to size constraints.  I therefore put it under
> CONFIG_RCU_TRACE, which also contains other TINY_RCU debugging-style
> options.  Would adding a comment to this effect help?

I understand the rationale; I just think it would become clearer if you
added an internal-only Kconfig symbol selected in both cases and change
the conditionals to use that.

- Josh Triplett
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