[RFC 0/4] Cpu-Hotplug: Use per subsystem hot-cpu mutexes.

Gautham R Shenoy
2006-11-14T12:52:19Z

Hello everyone,

Since 2.6.18-something, the community has been bugged by the problem to
provide a clean and a stable mechanism to postpone a cpu-hotplug event
as lock_cpu_hotplug was badly broken.

This is another proposal towards solving that problem. This one is
along the lines of the solution provided in kernel/workqueue.c

Instead of having a global mechanism like lock_cpu_hotplug,
we allow the subsytems to define their own per-subsystem hot cpu
mutexes. These would be taken(released) where ever we are currently
calling lock_cpu_hotplug(unlock_cpu_hotplug).

Also, in the per-subsystem hotcpu callback function,we take
this mutex before we handle any pre-cpu-hotplug events and release
it once we finish handling the post-cpu-hotplug events. A standard
means for doing this has been provided in [PATCH 2/4] and demonstrated
in [PATCH 3/4].

The ordering of these per-subsystem mutexes might still prove to be a
problem, but hopefully lockdep should help us get out of that muddle.

The patch set to be applied against linux-2.6.19-rc5 is as follows:

[PATCH 1/4] : Extend notifier_call_chain with an option to specify the
number of notifications to be sent and also count the
number of notifications actually sent.

[PATCH 2/4] : Define events CPU_LOCK_ACQUIRE and CPU_LOCK_RELEASE
and send out notifications for these in _cpu_up and
_cpu_down. This would help us standardise the acquire and
release of the subsystem locks in the hotcpu
callback functions of these subsystems.

[PATCH 3/4] : Eliminate lock_cpu_hotplug from kernel/sched.c.

[PATCH 4/4] : In workqueue_cpu_callback function, acquire(release) the
workqueue_mutex while handling
CPU_LOCK_ACQUIRE(CPU_LOCK_RELEASE).

If the per-subsystem-locking approach survives the test of time,
we can expect a slow phasing out of lock_cpu_hotplug, which has not
yet been eliminated in these patches :)

Awaiting your feedback.

Thanks,
gautham.

PS: These patches are intended for post 2.6.19, since most of the warnings
with respect to cpu_hotplug_locking (including the cpufreq ones) seem to
have disappeared in 2.6.19-rc5.