Re: [PATCH] Make rcutorture more vicious: reinstate boot-time testing

Josh Triplett
2008-06-19T00:49:23Z

Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> Hello again!
>
> This patch re-institutes the ability to build rcutorture directly into
> the Linux kernel. The reason that this capability was removed was that
> this could result in your kernel being pretty much useless, as rcutorture
> would be running starting from early boot. This problem has been avoided
> by (1) making rcutorture run only three seconds of every six by default,
> (2) adding a CONFIG_RCU_TORTURE_TEST_RUNNABLE that permits rcutorture
> to be quiesced at boot time, and (3) adding a sysctl in /proc named
> /proc/sys/kernel/rcutorture_runnable that permits rcutorture to be
> quiesced and unquiesced when built into the kernel.
>
> Please note that this /proc file is -not- available when rcutorture
> is built as a module. Please also note that to get the earlier
> take-no-prisoners behavior, you must use the boot command line to set
> rcutorture's "stutter" parameter to zero.
>
> The rcutorture quiescing mechanism is currently quite crude: loops
> in each rcutorture process that poll a global variable once per tick.
> Suggestions for improvement are welcome. The default action will
> be to reduce the polling rate to a few times per second.
>
> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> Suggested-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

This patch looks quite reasonable to me.

Signed-off-by: Josh Triplett <josh@kernel.org>

- Josh Triplett