If we enable RCU for the requests (providing a grace period where we can
inspect a "dead" request before it is freed), we can allow callers to
carefully perform lockless lookup of an active request.

However, by enabling deferred freeing of requests, we can potentially
hog a lot of memory when dealing with tens of thousands of requests per
second - with a quick insertion of a synchronize_rcu() inside our
shrinker callback, that issue disappears.

v2: Currently, it is our responsibility to handle reclaim i.e. to avoid
hogging memory with the delayed slab frees. At the moment, we wait for a
grace period in the shrinker, and block for all RCU callbacks on oom.
Suggested alternatives focus on flushing our RCU callback when we have a
certain number of outstanding request frees, and blocking on that flush
after a second high watermark. (So rather than wait for the system to
run out of memory, we stop issuing requests - both are nondeterministic.)

Paul E. McKenney wrote:

Another approach is synchronize_rcu() after some largish number of
requests.  The advantage of this approach is that it throttles the
production of callbacks at the source.  The corresponding disadvantage
is that it slows things up.

Another approach is to use call_rcu(), but if the previous call_rcu()
is still in flight, block waiting for it.  Yet another approach is
the get_state_synchronize_rcu() / cond_synchronize_rcu() pair.  The
idea is to do something like this:

        cond_synchronize_rcu(cookie);
        cookie = get_state_synchronize_rcu();

You would of course do an initial get_state_synchronize_rcu() to
get things going.  This would not block unless there was less than
one grace period's worth of time between invocations.  But this
assumes a busy system, where there is almost always a grace period
in flight.  But you can make that happen as follows:

        cond_synchronize_rcu(cookie);
        cookie = get_state_synchronize_rcu();
        call_rcu(&my_rcu_head, noop_function);

Note that you need additional code to make sure that the old callback
has completed before doing a new one.  Setting and clearing a flag
with appropriate memory ordering control suffices (e.g,. smp_load_acquire()
and smp_store_release()).

v3: More comments on compiler and processor order of operations within
the RCU lookup and discover we can use rcu_access_pointer() here instead.

v4: Wrap i915_gem_active_get_rcu() to take the rcu_read_lock itself.
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Maarten Lankhorst <maarten.lankhorst@linux.intel.com>
Cc: "Goel, Akash" <akash.goel@intel.com>
Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Cc: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
Link: http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/1470324762-2545-25-git-send-email-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk