Re: [PATCH 0/3] tools/memory-model: Add SRCU support

From: Paul E. McKenney
Date: Fri Nov 16 2018 - 01:43:24 EST


On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 11:19:24AM -0500, Alan Stern wrote:
> Paul and other LKMM maintainers:
>
> The following series of patches adds support for SRCU to the Linux
> Kernel Memory Model. That is, it adds the srcu_read_lock(),
> srcu_read_unlock(), and synchronize_srcu() primitives to the model.
>
> Patch 1/3 does some renaming of the RCU parts of the
> memory model's existing CAT code, to help distinguish them
> from the upcoming SRCU parts.
>
> Patch 2/3 refactors the definitions of some RCU relations
> in the CAT code, in a way that the SRCU portions will need.
>
> Patch 3/3 actually adds the SRCU support.
>
> This new code requires herd7 version 7.51+4(dev) or later (now
> available in the herdtools7 github repository) to run. Thanks to Luc
> for making the necessary changes to support SRCU.

These patches pass the tests that I have constructed, and also regression
tests, very nice! Applied and pushed, thank you.

> The code does not check that the index argument passed to
> srcu_read_unlock() is the same as the value returned by the
> corresponding srcu_read_lock() call. This is deemed to be a semantic
> issue, not directly relevant to the memory model.

Agreed.

If I understand correctly, there are in theory some use cases that these
patches do not support, for example:

r1 = srcu_read_lock(a);
do_1();
r2 = srcu_read_lock(a);
do_2();
srcu_read_unlock(a, r1);
do_3();
srcu_read_unlock(a, r2);

In practice, I would be more worried about this had I ever managed to
find a non-bogus use case for this pattern. ;-)

Thanx, Paul