Re: wireless locking simplifications

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello, Johannes.

On Fri, May 05, 2023 at 11:05:45PM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
...
> The implementation of (2) is a bit ... awkward, @Tejun, @Lai, there's no
> way to "pause" an ordered workqueue, is there? I came up with the below
> patch, but it's a bit ugly and requires a lot of context switches. Just
> flushing isn't enough since then some work might start and hang on
> acquiring the lock.

There isn't currently but workqueue already does something similar for
freezing by temporarily setting max_active to zero, so if you apply a patch
like the following

diff --git a/kernel/workqueue.c b/kernel/workqueue.c
index b8b541caed48..6daf9ee7450d 100644
--- a/kernel/workqueue.c
+++ b/kernel/workqueue.c
@@ -4360,11 +4360,11 @@ static int wq_clamp_max_active(int max_active, unsigned int flags,
 {
 	int lim = flags & WQ_UNBOUND ? WQ_UNBOUND_MAX_ACTIVE : WQ_MAX_ACTIVE;
 
-	if (max_active < 1 || max_active > lim)
+	if (max_active < 0 || max_active > lim)
 		pr_warn("workqueue: max_active %d requested for %s is out of range, clamping between %d and %d\n",
 			max_active, name, 1, lim);
 
-	return clamp_val(max_active, 1, lim);
+	return clamp_val(max_active, 0, lim);
 }
 
 /*
@@ -4625,7 +4625,8 @@ void workqueue_set_max_active(struct workqueue_struct *wq, int max_active)
 	struct pool_workqueue *pwq;
 
 	/* disallow meddling with max_active for ordered workqueues */
-	if (WARN_ON(wq->flags & __WQ_ORDERED_EXPLICIT))
+	if (WARN_ON((wq->flags & __WQ_ORDERED_EXPLICIT) &&
+		    max_active != 0 && max_active != 1))
 		return;
 
 	max_active = wq_clamp_max_active(max_active, wq->flags, wq->name);

and then do set_max_active(wq, 0) followed by flush_workqueue(), it should
be paused until max_active is restored to 1. It probably would be better to
add a separate pause / resume interface which sets a per-wq flag which is
read by pwq_adjust_max_active() tho. Anyways, it's not difficult to
implement at all.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun