Commit c28adacc authored by Frederic Weisbecker's avatar Frederic Weisbecker Committed by Paul E. McKenney

rcu/doc: Add a quick quiz to explain further why we need smp_mb__after_unlock_lock()

Add some missing critical pieces of explanation to understand the need
for full memory barriers throughout the whole grace period state machine,
thanks to Paul's explanations.
Signed-off-by: default avatarFrederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Cc: Neeraj Upadhyay <neeraju@codeaurora.org>
Cc: Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>
Cc: Uladzislau Rezki <urezki@gmail.com>
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
[ paulmck: Adjust code block per Akira Yokosawa. ]
Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
parent 9984fd7e
......@@ -112,6 +112,35 @@ on PowerPC.
The ``smp_mb__after_unlock_lock()`` invocations prevent this
``WARN_ON()`` from triggering.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| **Quick Quiz**: |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| But the chain of rcu_node-structure lock acquisitions guarantees |
| that new readers will see all of the updater's pre-grace-period |
| accesses and also guarantees that the updater's post-grace-period |
| accesses will see all of the old reader's accesses. So why do we |
| need all of those calls to smp_mb__after_unlock_lock()? |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| **Answer**: |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Because we must provide ordering for RCU's polling grace-period |
| primitives, for example, get_state_synchronize_rcu() and |
| poll_state_synchronize_rcu(). Consider this code:: |
| |
| CPU 0 CPU 1 |
| ---- ---- |
| WRITE_ONCE(X, 1) WRITE_ONCE(Y, 1) |
| g = get_state_synchronize_rcu() smp_mb() |
| while (!poll_state_synchronize_rcu(g)) r1 = READ_ONCE(X) |
| continue; |
| r0 = READ_ONCE(Y) |
| |
| RCU guarantees that the outcome r0 == 0 && r1 == 0 will not |
| happen, even if CPU 1 is in an RCU extended quiescent state |
| (idle or offline) and thus won't interact directly with the RCU |
| core processing at all. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
This approach must be extended to include idle CPUs, which need
RCU's grace-period memory ordering guarantee to extend to any
RCU read-side critical sections preceding and following the current
......
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