Re: [patch] cpufreq: mark cpufreq_tsc() as core_initcall_sync

[Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>]

On 11/21, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 12:56:21PM -0500, Alan Stern wrote:
> > Here's another potential problem with the fast path approach.  It's not
> > very serious, but you might want to keep it in mind.
> > 
> > The idea is that a reader can start up on one CPU and finish on another,
> > and a writer might see the finish event but not the start event.  For
> > example:
> 
> One approach to get around this would be for the the "idx" returned from
> srcu_read_lock() to keep track of the CPU as well as the index within
> the CPU.  This would require atomic_inc()/atomic_dec() on the fast path,
> but would not add much to the overhead on x86 because the smp_mb() imposes
> an atomic operation anyway.  There would be little cache thrashing in the
> case where there is no preemption -- but if the readers almost always sleep,
> and where it is common for the srcu_read_unlock() to run on a different CPU
> than the srcu_read_lock(), then the additional cache thrashing could add
> significant overhead.

If you are going to do this, it seems better to just forget about ->per_cpu_ref,
and use only ->hardluckref[]. This also allows to avoid the polling in
synchronize_srcu().

Oleg.