Re: [PATCH] sched: Fix lost reschedule in __cond_resched()

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 11:50:20AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Frederic Weisbecker
> <fweisbec@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Such as:
> 
> So I like your patch, but quite frankly, can we go one step further?
> 
> Look at the callers of __schedule().
> 
> EVERY SINGLE ONE now has that loop around it that goes along the lines of
> 
>    do {
>       .. disable preemption somehow ..
>       __schedule();
>       ...enable preemption without scheduling ..
>    } while (need_resced());
> 
> except for one - the regular "schedule()" function.
> 
> Furthermore, look inside __schedule() itself: it has the same loop,
> except with a count of one.
> 
> So I would suggest going the extra mile, and
>  - remove the loop from __schedule() itself

That sounds like a good idea. Unless the loop inside __schedule()
is very frequent and sensitive enough to show visible overhead if we
force it to pass through the preemp_count_add/sub() and local_irq_*()
operations in the preempt_schedule_*() functions.

I suspect it's not, so I'm cooking that patch.

>  - add the same loop as everywhere else to "schedule()"

Right. I'm doing that too.

> IOW, just make this "you have to loop and disable preemption" thing be
> a rule that __schedule() can depend on.

Ok. It would be nice if we could have a common function that does the loop
and PREEMPT_ACTIVE increments. But the variable code is inside that loop
so that's only factorizable with a function pointer (no-go in that fast-path)
or a macro that would make things even worse and ugly.

So I think I'll just keep all those loops explicit.

Thanks.

>                  Linus