• Paul E. McKenney's avatar
    rcu: Maintain special bits at bottom of ->dynticks counter · b8c17e66
    Paul E. McKenney authored
    Currently, IPIs are used to force other CPUs to invalidate their TLBs
    in response to a kernel virtual-memory mapping change.  This works, but
    degrades both battery lifetime (for idle CPUs) and real-time response
    (for nohz_full CPUs), and in addition results in unnecessary IPIs due to
    the fact that CPUs executing in usermode are unaffected by stale kernel
    mappings.  It would be better to cause a CPU executing in usermode to
    wait until it is entering kernel mode to do the flush, first to avoid
    interrupting usemode tasks and second to handle multiple flush requests
    with a single flush in the case of a long-running user task.
    
    This commit therefore reserves a bit at the bottom of the ->dynticks
    counter, which is checked upon exit from extended quiescent states.
    If it is set, it is cleared and then a new rcu_eqs_special_exit() macro is
    invoked, which, if not supplied, is an empty single-pass do-while loop.
    If this bottom bit is set on -entry- to an extended quiescent state,
    then a WARN_ON_ONCE() triggers.
    
    This bottom bit may be set using a new rcu_eqs_special_set() function,
    which returns true if the bit was set, or false if the CPU turned
    out to not be in an extended quiescent state.  Please note that this
    function refuses to set the bit for a non-nohz_full CPU when that CPU
    is executing in usermode because usermode execution is tracked by RCU
    as a dyntick-idle extended quiescent state only for nohz_full CPUs.
    Reported-by: default avatarAndy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarJosh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
    b8c17e66
tree.h 29.1 KB