On Fri, 1 Feb 2013, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Thomas Gleixner <t...@linutronix.de> wrote:
> >
> > Just face it. The current hotplug maze has 100+ states which are
> > completely undocumented. They are asymetric vs. startup and
> > teardown. They just exists and work somehow aside of the occasional
> > hard to decode hickup.
> >
> > Do you really want to preserve that state by all means [F*ck no]?
>
> No., But I also don't want to replace it with "there's now eleven
> documented states, and random people hook into random documented
> states".
That's not the plan.
> So for me it's the "expose these states" that I get worried about.. A
> random driver should not necessarily even be able to *see* this, and
> decide to be clever and take advantage of the ordering.
>
> So I'd hope there would be some visibility restrictions. We currently
> have drivers already being confused by DOWN_PREPARE vs DOWN_FAILED etc
> etc random state transitions, and giving them even more flexibility to
> pick random states sounds like a really bad idea. I'd like to make
> sure that drivers and filesystems etc do not even *see* the states
> that are meant for the scheduler or workqueues, for example).
The only states where drivers, filesystems etc are going to see in the
end is:
CPUHP_PREP_<datastructures> // Get datastructures set up / freed.
This is _before_ a cpu comes to life and _after_ it is gone. And that
does not require ordering.
CPUHP_ENABLE_<stuff_on_CPU> // Enable/disable facilities
This is _before_ a cpu becomes visible to the general scheduler and
_after_ it has been removed from it.
Those states do not require ordering at least not at the driver level.
And they are not going to be exposed with a dozen of substates. The
only information at both stages is going to be: setup or teardown.
The enable/disable stuff is not allowed to fail. There is no reason
why a driver could veto a cpu offline operation.
The only thing which can fail is the setup stage in preparation, where
you could fail to allocate memory etc.
> So 11 states (although some of those seem to have lots of substates,
> so there may be many more) is too many to *expose*. It's not
> necessarily too many to "have and document", if you see the
> difference.
I don't want to expose them to the general public. I just want the
(arch) core states documented proper with an explicit ordering
scheme. Drivers and stuff should not even know about ordering
requirements.
Thanks,
tglx
--
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/
