Re: [PATCH v15 04/13] task_isolation: add initial support

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 8:32 AM, Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@mellanox.com> wrote:
> On 8/30/2016 3:58 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 12:40:32PM -0400, Chris Metcalf wrote:
>>>
>>> On 8/29/2016 12:33 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 05:19:27PM -0400, Chris Metcalf wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> +       /*
>>>>> +        * Request rescheduling unless we are in full dynticks mode.
>>>>> +        * We would eventually get pre-empted without this, and if
>>>>> +        * there's another task waiting, it would run; but by
>>>>> +        * explicitly requesting the reschedule, we may reduce the
>>>>> +        * latency.  We could directly call schedule() here as well,
>>>>> +        * but since our caller is the standard place where schedule()
>>>>> +        * is called, we defer to the caller.
>>>>> +        *
>>>>> +        * A more substantive approach here would be to use a struct
>>>>> +        * completion here explicitly, and complete it when we shut
>>>>> +        * down dynticks, but since we presumably have nothing better
>>>>> +        * to do on this core anyway, just spinning seems plausible.
>>>>> +        */
>>>>> +       if (!tick_nohz_tick_stopped())
>>>>> +               set_tsk_need_resched(current);
>>>>
>>>> This is broken.. and it would be really good if you don't actually need
>>>> to do this.
>>>
>>> Can you elaborate?  We clearly do want to wait until we are in full
>>> dynticks mode before we return to userspace.
>>>
>>> We could do it just in the prctl() syscall only, but then we lose the
>>> ability to implement the NOSIG mode, which can be a convenience.
>>
>> So this isn't spelled out anywhere. Why does this need to be in the
>> return to user path?
>
>
> I'm not sure where this should be spelled out, to be honest.  I guess
> I can add some commentary to the commit message explaining this part.
>
> The basic idea is just that we don't want to be at risk from the
> dyntick getting enabled.  Similarly, we don't want to be at risk of a
> later global IPI due to lru_add_drain stuff, for example.  And, we may
> want to add additional stuff, like catching kernel TLB flushes and
> deferring them when a remote core is in userspace.  To do all of this
> kind of stuff, we need to run in the return to user path so we are
> late enough to guarantee no further kernel things will happen to
> perturb our carefully-arranged isolation state that includes dyntick
> off, per-cpu lru cache empty, etc etc.

None of the above should need to *loop*, though, AFAIK.

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