Re: [PATCH] perf_event: fix loss of notification with multi-event sampling

Stephane Eranian
2011-11-22T14:13:28Z

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 14:15 +0100, Stephane Eranian wrote:
>
>> > Ah, could it be a race of poll()/wakeup() vs perf_event_set_output() ?
>> >
>> Are you saying that by dropping event->waitq in favor of event->rb->waitq
>> we make this problem disappear due to rcu protections?
>
> Well, except..
>
>> Poll_wait() is a blocking call. It may wait on a stale waitq.  But that problem
>> was probably already there. I am not clear as to what to do about that.
>> in perf_set_output() you would need to wakeup from poll_wait() and then
>> go back in with the new waitq.
>
> Right, the whole blocking thing is a problem, and the whole poll()
> interface always makes my head hurt.
>
> If there was a go-sleep and wake-up side to poll we could do
> ring_buffer_get()/put() and fix this problem, but I'm not finding a way
> to make that happen quite yet.
>
>> Similarly, I am not clear as to what happens when you close an event for
>> which you have  a waiter in poll_wait(). I assume you wakeup from it.
>> But I don't see where that's implemented.
>
> Good point, yes we should do that.
>
I looked at how this is done for regular files: eventpoll_release(file);
I think we need to have that call in free_event() or something like that.
I did verify that in a multi-threaded prog, you do get stuck in poll() if
one of the threads closes the event fd.