Re: [BUG] 2.6.37-rc3 massive interactivity regression on ARM

Christoph Lameter
2010-12-10T19:51:27Z

On Fri, 10 Dec 2010, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> > > gcc wont be able to do this yet (%fs/%gs selectors)
> >
> > The kernel can do that using the __percpu annotation.
>
> That's not true:
>
> # define __percpu
>
> Its a complete NOP.

The annotation serves for sparse checking. .... If you do not care about
those checks then you can simply pass a percpu pointer in the same form as
a regular pointer.

> > > But we can provide this_cpu_write_seqcount_{begin|end}()
> >
> > No we cannot do hat. this_cpu ops are for per cpu data and not for locking
> > values shared between processors. We have a mechanism for passing per cpu
> > pointers with a corresponding annotation.
>
> -enoparse, its not locking anything, is a per-cpu sequence count.

seqlocks are for synchronization of objects on different processors.

Seems that you do not have that use case in mind. So a seqlock restricted
to a single processor? If so then you wont need any of those smp write
barriers mentioned earlier. A simple compiler barrier() is sufficient.