On Saturday, December 05, 2015 09:40:42 AM Viresh Kumar wrote: > On 05-12-15, 03:14, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > Well, almost, but not quite yet, because now the question is what prevents > > gov_cancel_work() from racing with dbs_work_handler(). > > > > If you can guarantee that they'll never run in parallel with each other, > > They can run in parallel and that's how we fix it now: > - raising skip_work to 2 makes sure that no new timer-handler can > queue a new work.
What about if that happens in parallel with the decrementation in dbs_work_handler()? Is there anything preventing that from happening? > - After raising the value of skip_work to 2, we do cancel_work_sync(). > Which will make sure that the work-handler has finished after > cancel_work_sync() has returned. > - At this point of time we are sure that the works and their handlers > are completely killed. > - All that is left is to kill all timer-handler (which might have > gotten queued from the work handler, before it finished). > - And we do that with gov_cancel_timers(). > - And then we are in safe state, where we are guaranteed that there > are no leftovers. Yes, that part will work. > > you probably don't need the whole counter dance. Otherwise, > > dbs_work_handler() > > should decrement the counter under the spinlock after all I suppose. > > Its not required because we don't have any race around that decrement > operation. As I said, if you can guarantee that the decrementation of the counter in dbs_work_handler() cannot happen at the same time as the incrementation of it in gov_cancel_work(), all is fine, but can you actually guarantee that? That aside, I think you could avoid using the spinlock altogether if the counter was atomic (and which would make the above irrelevant too). Say, skip_work is atomic the the relevant code in dbs_timer_handler() is written as atomic_inc(&shared->skip_work); smp_mb__after_atomic(); if (atomic_read(&shared->skip_work) > 1) atomic_dec(&shared->skip_work); else queue_work(system_wq, &shared->work); and the remaining incrementation and decrementation of skip_work are replaced with the corresponding atomic operations, it still should work, no? Thanks, Rafael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/