Extend notifier_call_chain to count nr_calls made
Since 2.6.18-something, the community has been bugged by the problem to provide a clean and a stable mechanism to postpone a cpu-hotplug event as lock_cpu_hotplug was badly broken. This is another proposal towards solving that problem. This one is along the lines of the solution provided in kernel/workqueue.c Instead of having a global mechanism like lock_cpu_hotplug, we allow the subsytems to define their own per-subsystem hot cpu mutexes. These would be taken(released) where ever we are currently calling lock_cpu_hotplug(unlock_cpu_hotplug). Also, in the per-subsystem hotcpu callback function,we take this mutex before we handle any pre-cpu-hotplug events and release it once we finish handling the post-cpu-hotplug events. A standard means for doing this has been provided in [PATCH 2/4] and demonstrated in [PATCH 3/4]. The ordering of these per-subsystem mutexes might still prove to be a problem, but hopefully lockdep should help us get out of that muddle. The patch set to be applied against linux-2.6.19-rc5 is as follows: [PATCH 1/4] : Extend notifier_call_chain with an option to specify the number of notifications to be sent and also count the number of notifications actually sent. [PATCH 2/4] : Define events CPU_LOCK_ACQUIRE and CPU_LOCK_RELEASE and send out notifications for these in _cpu_up and _cpu_down. This would help us standardise the acquire and release of the subsystem locks in the hotcpu callback functions of these subsystems. [PATCH 3/4] : Eliminate lock_cpu_hotplug from kernel/sched.c. [PATCH 4/4] : In workqueue_cpu_callback function, acquire(release) the workqueue_mutex while handling CPU_LOCK_ACQUIRE(CPU_LOCK_RELEASE). If the per-subsystem-locking approach survives the test of time, we can expect a slow phasing out of lock_cpu_hotplug, which has not yet been eliminated in these patches :) This patch: Provide notifier_call_chain with an option to call only a specified number of notifiers and also record the number of call to notifiers made. The need for this enhancement was identified in the post entitled "Slab - Eliminate lock_cpu_hotplug from slab" (http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/28/92) by Ravikiran G Thirumalai and Andrew Morton. This patch adds two additional parameters to notifier_call_chain API namely - int nr_to_calls : Number of notifier_functions to be called. The don't care value is -1. - unsigned int *nr_calls : Records the total number of notifier_funtions called by notifier_call_chain. The don't care value is NULL. [michal.k.k.piotrowski@gmail.com: build fix] Credit: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Gautham R Shenoy <ego@in.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Michal Piotrowski <michal.k.k.piotrowski@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment