Re: [PATCH 4/6] kvm tools: Add rwlock wrapper

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> wrote:

> > So if you set a notification signal via fcntl(F_SETOWN) on the 
> > scheduler context switch event fd, the user-space RCU code will 
> > get a signal on every context switch.
> 
> Context switches are completely uninteresting for userspace rcu:
> 
>   rcu_read_lock();
>   ---> context switch
> 
> have we learned anything from that?  no.  User code is always 
> preemptible and migratable.  If rcu_read_lock() prevented migration 
> somehow, then we'd know that a context switch means we've started a 
> grace period for this thread.  But it doesn't, so we don't.

Well, in the next mail i mentioned that we can do migration events as 
well, which would be useful: instead of having to keep track of 
nr_tasks RCU grace periods we could simplify it down to nr_cpus.

But if we indexed by the TID then we wouldnt need any scheduler 
bindings at all - this is the simpler approach.

> What's needed are explicit notifications about grace periods.  For 
> the vcpu threads, calling KVM_VCPU_RUN seems like a good point.  
> For I/O threads, completion of processing of an event is also a 
> good point.

Grace period notifications are needed too, obviously.

Thanks,

	Ingo