aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/RCU/trace.txt
Commit message (Collapse)AuthorAgeFilesLines
* rcu: Simplify quiescent-state accountingPaul E. McKenney2011-09-281-17/+17
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | There is often a delay between the time that a CPU passes through a quiescent state and the time that this quiescent state is reported to the RCU core. It is quite possible that the grace period ended before the quiescent state could be reported, for example, some other CPU might have deduced that this CPU passed through dyntick-idle mode. It is critically important that quiescent state be counted only against the grace period that was in effect at the time that the quiescent state was detected. Previously, this was handled by recording the number of the last grace period to complete when passing through a quiescent state. The RCU core then checks this number against the current value, and rejects the quiescent state if there is a mismatch. However, one additional possibility must be accounted for, namely that the quiescent state was recorded after the prior grace period completed but before the current grace period started. In this case, the RCU core must reject the quiescent state, but the recorded number will match. This is handled when the CPU becomes aware of a new grace period -- at that point, it invalidates any prior quiescent state. This works, but is a bit indirect. The new approach records the current grace period, and the RCU core checks to see (1) that this is still the current grace period and (2) that this grace period has not yet ended. This approach simplifies reasoning about correctness, and this commit changes over to this new approach. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: Update documentation to flag RCU_BOOST trace informationPaul E. McKenney2011-09-281-0/+4
| | | | | | | | Call out the RCU_TRACE information that is provided only in kernels built with RCU_BOOST. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proofPaul E. McKenney2011-05-261-12/+5
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Note: this was reverted, and is now being re-applied in pieces, with this being the fifth and final piece. See below for the reason that it is now felt to be safe to re-apply this.) Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb() invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view. In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.) This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in deadlock. The proof is as follows: 1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of its leaf rcu_node's lock. 2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the ->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf node's lock. 3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure. Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node. 4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened before the update of ->completed. 5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp() will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock. If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity. 6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible for invocation. If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy, we will still be in the single critical section. In this case, the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state. On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period. On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp(). The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick per CPU to once per grace period. This was reverted do to hangs found during testing by Yinghai Lu and Ingo Molnar. Frederic Weisbecker supplied Yinghai with tracing that located the underlying problem, and Frederic also provided the fix. The underlying problem was that the HARDIRQ_ENTER() macro from lib/locking-selftest.c invoked irq_enter(), which in turn invokes rcu_irq_enter(), but HARDIRQ_EXIT() invoked __irq_exit(), which does not invoke rcu_irq_exit(). This situation resulted in calls to rcu_irq_enter() that were not balanced by the required calls to rcu_irq_exit(). Therefore, after these locking selftests completed, RCU's dyntick-idle nesting count was a large number (for example, 72), which caused RCU to to conclude that the affected CPU was not in dyntick-idle mode when in fact it was. RCU would therefore incorrectly wait for this dyntick-idle CPU, resulting in hangs. In contrast, with Frederic's patch, which replaces the irq_enter() in HARDIRQ_ENTER() with an __irq_enter(), these tests don't ever call either rcu_irq_enter() or rcu_irq_exit(), which works because the CPU running the test is already marked as not being in dyntick-idle mode. This means that the rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() calls and RCU then has no problem working out which CPUs are in dyntick-idle mode and which are not. The reason that the imbalance was not noticed before the barrier patch was applied is that the old implementation of rcu_enter_nohz() ignored the nesting depth. This could still result in delays, but much shorter ones. Whenever there was a delay, RCU would IPI the CPU with the unbalanced nesting level, which would eventually result in rcu_enter_nohz() being called, which in turn would force RCU to see that the CPU was in dyntick-idle mode. The reason that very few people noticed the problem is that the mismatched irq_enter() vs. __irq_exit() occured only when the kernel was built with CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCKING_API_SELFTESTS. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
* Revert "rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proof"Paul E. McKenney2011-05-191-5/+12
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This reverts commit e59fb3120becfb36b22ddb8bd27d065d3cdca499. This reversion was due to (extreme) boot-time slowdowns on SPARC seen by Yinghai Lu and on x86 by Ingo . This is a non-trivial reversion due to intervening commits. Conflicts: Documentation/RCU/trace.txt kernel/rcutree.c Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
* rcu: Add forward-progress diagnostic for per-CPU kthreadsPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-17/+22
| | | | | | | | | Increment a per-CPU counter on each pass through rcu_cpu_kthread()'s service loop, and add it to the rcudata trace output. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
* rcu: add grace-period age and more kthread state to tracingPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-2/+10
| | | | | | | | | | | | This commit adds the age in jiffies of the current grace period along with the duration in jiffies of the longest grace period since boot to the rcu/rcugp debugfs file. It also adds an additional "O" state to kthread tracing to differentiate between the kthread waiting due to having nothing to do on the one hand and waiting due to being on the wrong CPU on the other hand. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: update tracing documentation for new rcutorture and rcuboostPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-25/+161
| | | | | | | | | This commit documents the new debugfs rcu/rcutorture and rcu/rcuboost trace files. The description has been updated as suggested by Josh Triplett. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: add callback-queue information to rcudata outputPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-16/+42
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This commit adds an indication of the state of the callback queue using a string of four characters following the "ql=" integer queue length. The first character is "N" if there are callbacks that have been queued that are not yet ready to be handled by the next grace period, or "." otherwise. The second character is "R" if there are callbacks queued that are ready to be handled by the next grace period, or "." otherwise. The third character is "W" if there are callbacks waiting for the current grace period, or "." otherwise. Finally, the fourth character is "D" if there are callbacks that have been handled by a prior grace period and are waiting to be invoked, or ".". Note that callbacks that are in the process of being invoked are not shown. These callbacks would have been removed from the rcu_data structure's list by rcu_do_batch() prior to being executed. (These callbacks are also not reflected in the "ql=" total, FWIW.) Also, document the new callback-queue trace information. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
* rcu: Update RCU's trace.txt documentation for new formatPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-31/+34
| | | | | | | | | The trace.txt file had obsolete output for the debugfs rcu/rcudata file, so update it. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
* rcu: merge TREE_PREEPT_RCU blocked_tasks[] listsPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-11/+18
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Combine the current TREE_PREEMPT_RCU ->blocked_tasks[] lists in the rcu_node structure into a single ->blkd_tasks list with ->gp_tasks and ->exp_tasks tail pointers. This is in preparation for RCU priority boosting, which will add a third dimension to the combinatorial explosion in the ->blocked_tasks[] case, but simply a third pointer in the new ->blkd_tasks case. Also update documentation to reflect blocked_tasks[] merge Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
* rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proofPaul E. McKenney2011-05-051-28/+20
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb() invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view. In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.) This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in deadlock. The proof is as follows: 1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of its leaf rcu_node's lock. 2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the ->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf node's lock. 3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure. Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node. 4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened before the update of ->completed. 5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp() will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock. If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity. 6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible for invocation. If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy, we will still be in the single critical section. In this case, the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state. On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period. On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp(). The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick per CPU to once per grace period. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
* rcu: update documentation/comments for Lai's adoption patchPaul E. McKenney2010-11-291-8/+4
| | | | | | | | Lai's RCU-callback immediate-adoption patch changes the RCU tracing output, so update tracing.txt. Also update a few comments to clarify the synchronization design. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: document TINY_RCU and TINY_PREEMPT_RCU tracing.Paul E. McKenney2010-11-291-8/+124
| | | | | | | Add the required verbiage to Documentation/RCU/trace.txt. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: Add tracing data to support queueing modelsPaul E. McKenney2010-09-231-1/+12
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The current tracing data is not sufficient to deduce the average time that a callback spends waiting for a grace period to end. Add three per-CPU counters recording the number of callbacks invoked (ci), the number of callbacks orphaned (co), and the number of callbacks adopted (ca). Given the existing callback queue length (ql), the average wait time in absence of CPU hotplug operations is ql/ci. The units of wait time will be in terms of the duration over which ci was measured. In the presence of CPU hotplug operations, there is room for argument, but ql/(ci-co+ca) won't steer you too far wrong. Also fixes a typo called out by Lucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@gmail.com>. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: reduce the number of spurious RCU_SOFTIRQ invocationsPaul E. McKenney2010-05-101-16/+19
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Lai Jiangshan noted that up to 10% of the RCU_SOFTIRQ are spurious, and traced this down to the fact that the current grace-period machinery will uselessly raise RCU_SOFTIRQ when a given CPU needs to go through a quiescent state, but has not yet done so. In this situation, there might well be nothing that RCU_SOFTIRQ can do, and the overhead can be worth worrying about in the ksoftirqd case. This patch therefore avoids raising RCU_SOFTIRQ in this situation. Changes since v1 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/3/30/122 from Lai Jiangshan): o Omit the rcu_qs_pending() prechecks, as they aren't that much less expensive than the quiescent-state checks. o Merge with the set_need_resched() patch that reduces IPIs. o Add the new n_rp_report_qs field to the rcu_pending tracing output. o Update the tracing documentation accordingly. Signed-off-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
* rcu: Update trace.txt documentation for blocked-tasks listsPaul E. McKenney2009-10-151-7/+16
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com Cc: dipankar@in.ibm.com Cc: mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca Cc: josh@joshtriplett.org Cc: dvhltc@us.ibm.com Cc: niv@us.ibm.com Cc: peterz@infradead.org Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org Cc: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu Cc: dhowells@redhat.com Cc: npiggin@suse.de Cc: jens.axboe@oracle.com LKML-Reference: <12555405592804-git-send-email-> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
* rcu: Update trace.txt documentation to reflect recent changesPaul E. McKenney2009-10-151-198/+33
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | o Remove the CONFIG_PREEMPT_RCU documentation since this config option has now been removed. o Change the now-incorrect references to "rcu" labels to instead be "rcu_sched". o Add notes stating that CONFIG_TREE_PREEMPT_RCU kernels will have additional "rcu_preempt" output. o Note the new "oqlen" field in the rcuhier output (for RCU callbacks orphaned by an offlined CPU). Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com Cc: dipankar@in.ibm.com Cc: mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca Cc: josh@joshtriplett.org Cc: dvhltc@us.ibm.com Cc: niv@us.ibm.com Cc: peterz@infradead.org Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org Cc: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu Cc: dhowells@redhat.com Cc: npiggin@suse.de Cc: jens.axboe@oracle.com LKML-Reference: <1255540559799-git-send-email-> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
* rcu: Renamings to increase RCU clarityPaul E. McKenney2009-08-231-4/+3
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Make RCU-sched, RCU-bh, and RCU-preempt be underlying implementations, with "RCU" defined in terms of one of the three. Update the outdated rcu_qsctr_inc() names, as these functions no longer increment anything. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com Cc: dipankar@in.ibm.com Cc: akpm@linux-foundation.org Cc: mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca Cc: josht@linux.vnet.ibm.com Cc: dvhltc@us.ibm.com Cc: niv@us.ibm.com Cc: peterz@infradead.org Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org LKML-Reference: <12509746132696-git-send-email-> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
* rcu: Update RCU tracing documentation for __rcu_pendingPaul E. McKenney2009-04-141-22/+80
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This patch updates the RCU documentation to reflect the changes in tracing made in the previous patch in the set. Located-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@au1.ibm.com> Tested-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@au1.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: anton@samba.org Cc: akpm@linux-foundation.org Cc: dipankar@in.ibm.com Cc: manfred@colorfullife.com Cc: cl@linux-foundation.org Cc: josht@linux.vnet.ibm.com Cc: schamp@sgi.com Cc: niv@us.ibm.com Cc: dvhltc@us.ibm.com Cc: ego@in.ibm.com Cc: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org Cc: peterz@infradead.org Cc: penberg@cs.helsinki.fi Cc: andi@firstfloor.org Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> LKML-Reference: <12396834792865-git-send-email-> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
* "Tree RCU": scalable classic RCU implementationPaul E. McKenney2008-12-181-0/+413
This patch fixes a long-standing performance bug in classic RCU that results in massive internal-to-RCU lock contention on systems with more than a few hundred CPUs. Although this patch creates a separate flavor of RCU for ease of review and patch maintenance, it is intended to replace classic RCU. This patch still handles stress better than does mainline, so I am still calling it ready for inclusion. This patch is against the -tip tree. Nevertheless, experience on an actual 1000+ CPU machine would still be most welcome. Most of the changes noted below were found while creating an rcutiny (which should permit ejecting the current rcuclassic) and while doing detailed line-by-line documentation. Updates from v9 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/2/334): o Fixes from remainder of line-by-line code walkthrough, including comment spelling, initialization, undesirable narrowing due to type conversion, removing redundant memory barriers, removing redundant local-variable initialization, and removing redundant local variables. I do not believe that any of these fixes address the CPU-hotplug issues that Andi Kleen was seeing, but please do give it a whirl in case the machine is smarter than I am. A writeup from the walkthrough may be found at the following URL, in case you are suffering from terminal insomnia or masochism: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/tmp/rcutree-walkthrough.2008.12.16a.pdf o Made rcutree tracing use seq_file, as suggested some time ago by Lai Jiangshan. o Added a .csv variant of the rcudata debugfs trace file, to allow people having thousands of CPUs to drop the data into a spreadsheet. Tested with oocalc and gnumeric. Updated documentation to suit. Updates from v8 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/15/139): o Fix a theoretical race between grace-period initialization and force_quiescent_state() that could occur if more than three jiffies were required to carry out the grace-period initialization. Which it might, if you had enough CPUs. o Apply Ingo's printk-standardization patch. o Substitute local variables for repeated accesses to global variables. o Fix comment misspellings and redundant (but harmless) increments of ->n_rcu_pending (this latter after having explicitly added it). o Apply checkpatch fixes. Updates from v7 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/10/291): o Fixed a number of problems noted by Gautham Shenoy, including the cpu-stall-detection bug that he was having difficulty convincing me was real. ;-) o Changed cpu-stall detection to wait for ten seconds rather than three in order to reduce false positive, as suggested by Ingo Molnar. o Produced a design document (http://lwn.net/Articles/305782/). The act of writing this document uncovered a number of both theoretical and "here and now" bugs as noted below. o Fix dynticks_nesting accounting confusion, simplify WARN_ON() condition, fix kerneldoc comments, and add memory barriers in dynticks interface functions. o Add more data to tracing. o Remove unused "rcu_barrier" field from rcu_data structure. o Count calls to rcu_pending() from scheduling-clock interrupt to use as a surrogate timebase should jiffies stop counting. o Fix a theoretical race between force_quiescent_state() and grace-period initialization. Yes, initialization does have to go on for some jiffies for this race to occur, but given enough CPUs... Updates from v6 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/23/448): o Fix a number of checkpatch.pl complaints. o Apply review comments from Ingo Molnar and Lai Jiangshan on the stall-detection code. o Fix several bugs in !CONFIG_SMP builds. o Fix a misspelled config-parameter name so that RCU now announces at boot time if stall detection is configured. o Run tests on numerous combinations of configurations parameters, which after the fixes above, now build and run correctly. Updates from v5 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/15/92, bad subject line): o Fix a compiler error in the !CONFIG_FANOUT_EXACT case (blew a changeset some time ago, and finally got around to retesting this option). o Fix some tracing bugs in rcupreempt that caused incorrect totals to be printed. o I now test with a more brutal random-selection online/offline script (attached). Probably more brutal than it needs to be on the people reading it as well, but so it goes. o A number of optimizations and usability improvements: o Make rcu_pending() ignore the grace-period timeout when there is no grace period in progress. o Make force_quiescent_state() avoid going for a global lock in the case where there is no grace period in progress. o Rearrange struct fields to improve struct layout. o Make call_rcu() initiate a grace period if RCU was idle, rather than waiting for the next scheduling clock interrupt. o Invoke rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() only when idle, as suggested by Andi Kleen. I still don't completely trust this change, and might back it out. o Make CONFIG_RCU_TRACE be the single config variable manipulated for all forms of RCU, instead of the prior confusion. o Document tracing files and formats for both rcupreempt and rcutree. Updates from v4 for those missing v5 given its bad subject line: o Separated dynticks interface so that NMIs and irqs call separate functions, greatly simplifying it. In particular, this code no longer requires a proof of correctness. ;-) o Separated dynticks state out into its own per-CPU structure, avoiding the duplicated accounting. o The case where a dynticks-idle CPU runs an irq handler that invokes call_rcu() is now correctly handled, forcing that CPU out of dynticks-idle mode. o Review comments have been applied (thank you all!!!). For but one example, fixed the dynticks-ordering issue that Manfred pointed out, saving me much debugging. ;-) o Adjusted rcuclassic and rcupreempt to handle dynticks changes. Attached is an updated patch to Classic RCU that applies a hierarchy, greatly reducing the contention on the top-level lock for large machines. This passes 10-hour concurrent rcutorture and online-offline testing on 128-CPU ppc64 without dynticks enabled, and exposes some timekeeping bugs in presence of dynticks (exciting working on a system where "sleep 1" hangs until interrupted...), which were fixed in the 2.6.27 kernel. It is getting more reliable than mainline by some measures, so the next version will be against -tip for inclusion. See also Manfred Spraul's recent patches (or his earlier work from 2004 at http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=108546384711797&w=2). We will converge onto a common patch in the fullness of time, but are currently exploring different regions of the design space. That said, I have already gratefully stolen quite a few of Manfred's ideas. This patch provides CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, which controls the bushiness of the RCU hierarchy. Defaults to 32 on 32-bit machines and 64 on 64-bit machines. If CONFIG_NR_CPUS is less than CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, there is no hierarchy. By default, the RCU initialization code will adjust CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT to balance the hierarchy, so strongly NUMA architectures may choose to set CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_EXACT to disable this balancing, allowing the hierarchy to be exactly aligned to the underlying hardware. Up to two levels of hierarchy are permitted (in addition to the root node), allowing up to 16,384 CPUs on 32-bit systems and up to 262,144 CPUs on 64-bit systems. I just know that I am going to regret saying this, but this seems more than sufficient for the foreseeable future. (Some architectures might wish to set CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT=4, which would limit such architectures to 64 CPUs. If this becomes a real problem, additional levels can be added, but I doubt that it will make a significant difference on real hardware.) In the common case, a given CPU will manipulate its private rcu_data structure and the rcu_node structure that it shares with its immediate neighbors. This can reduce both lock and memory contention by multiple orders of magnitude, which should eliminate the need for the strange manipulations that are reported to be required when running Linux on very large systems. Some shortcomings: o More bugs will probably surface as a result of an ongoing line-by-line code inspection. Patches will be provided as required. o There are probably hangs, rcutorture failures, &c. Seems quite stable on a 128-CPU machine, but that is kind of small compared to 4096 CPUs. However, seems to do better than mainline. Patches will be provided as required. o The memory footprint of this version is several KB larger than rcuclassic. A separate UP-only rcutiny patch will be provided, which will reduce the memory footprint significantly, even compared to the old rcuclassic. One such patch passes light testing, and has a memory footprint smaller even than rcuclassic. Initial reaction from various embedded guys was "it is not worth it", so am putting it aside. Credits: o Manfred Spraul for ideas, review comments, and bugs spotted, as well as some good friendly competition. ;-) o Josh Triplett, Ingo Molnar, Peter Zijlstra, Mathieu Desnoyers, Lai Jiangshan, Andi Kleen, Andy Whitcroft, and Andrew Morton for reviews and comments. o Thomas Gleixner for much-needed help with some timer issues (see patches below). o Jon M. Tollefson, Tim Pepper, Andrew Theurer, Jose R. Santos, Andy Whitcroft, Darrick Wong, Nishanth Aravamudan, Anton Blanchard, Dave Kleikamp, and Nathan Lynch for keeping machines alive despite my heavy abuse^Wtesting. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>