• Paul E. McKenney's avatar
    rcu: Decrease memory-barrier usage based on semi-formal proof · e59fb312
    Paul E. McKenney authored
    Commit d09b62df 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: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarJosh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
    e59fb312
rcutree.c 57 KB