On Mon, Oct 15, 2018 at 01:15:56PM -0700, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2018 at 12:54:26PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> [...]
> > > > In any case, please don't spin for milliseconds with preemption
> > > > disabled.
> > > > The real-time guys are unlikely to be happy with you if you do this!
> > >
> > > Well just to clarify, I was just running Oleg's test which did this. This
> > > test was mentioned in the original documentation that I deleted. Ofcourse
> > > I
> > > would not dare do such a thing in production code :-D. I guess to Oleg's
> > > defense, he did it to very that synchronize_rcu() was not blocked on
> > > preempt-disable sections which was a different test.
> >
> > Understood! Just pointing out that RCU's tolerating a given action does
> > not necessarily mean that it is a good idea to take that action. ;-)
>
> Makes sense :-) thanks.
Don't worry, that won't happen again. ;-)
> > > > > > + pr_crit("SPIN done!\n");
> > > > > > + preempt_enable();
> > > > > > + break;
> > > > > > + case 777:
> > > > > > + pr_crit("SYNC start\n");
> > > > > > + synchronize_rcu();
> > > > > > + pr_crit("SYNC done!\n");
> > > > >
> > > > > But you are using the console printing infrastructure which is rather
> > > > > heavyweight. Try replacing pr_* calls with trace_printk so that you
> > > > > write to the lock-free ring buffer, this will reduce the noise from
> > > > > the
> > > > > heavy console printing infrastructure.
> > > >
> > > > And this might be a problem as well.
> > >
> > > This was not the issue (or atleast not fully the issue) since I saw the
> > > same
> > > thing with trace_printk. It was exactly what you said - which is the
> > > excessively long preempt disabled times.
> >
> > One approach would be to apply this patch against (say) v4.18, which
> > does not have consolidated grace periods. You might then be able to
> > tell if the pr_crit() calls make any difference.
>
> I could do that, yeah. But since the original problem went away due to
> disabling preempts for a short while, I will move on and continue to focus on
> updating other parts of the documenation. Just to mention I
> brought this up because I thought its better to do that than not to, just
> incase there is any lurking issue with the consolidation. Sorry if that ended
> up with me being noisy.
Not a problem, no need to apologize!
> Just curious, while I am going through the documentation, is there anything
> in particular that particularly sticks out to you that needs updating? I
> think I am around 50% there with the last several rounds of doc patches but I
> have lot more to go through. "Just keep doing what you're doing" is also a
> perfectly valid answer ;-)
It is the things needing updating that I do not yet know about that worry
the most, so "Just keep doing what you're doing" seems most appropriate. ;-)
Thanx, Paul
