Re: CPUFREQ-CPUHOTPLUG: Possible circular locking dependency

Gautham R Shenoy
2006-11-30T12:31:20Z

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 12:53:27PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * Gautham R Shenoy <ego@in.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> > This is what is currently being done by cpufreq:
>
> ok!
>
> > a) get_some_cpu_hotplug_protection() [use either some global mechanism
> > or a persubsystem mutex]
>
> this bit is wrong i think. Any reason why it's not a per-CPU (but
> otherwise global) array of mutexes that controls CPU hotplug - as per my
> previous mail?
>
> that would flatten the whole locking. Only one kind of lock taken,
> recursive and scalable.

I had posted one such recursive scalable version which can be found here
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/26/73

I remember cc'ing you.

Yeah, it looks complicated and big, but then I did not want to add
another field to the task struct as one such attempt had already been
frowned upon ( I think long back Ashok posted it)

So I ended up writing the whole read/write lock/unlock code myself.

It's a RCU based lock, extremely light on the read side, but costly for the
writers since it does a synchronize_sched.

And yeah, it's partial towards the readers but with an additional field
in the task struct we can have a fair implementation.

Besides, an unfair cpu_hotplug_lock won't work since a process doing a
sched_getaffinity in a forever_while loop can prevent any hotplug from
happening.

>
> Then the mechanism that changes CPU frequency should take all these
> hotplug locks on all (online) CPUs, and then first stop all processing
> on all CPUs, and then do the frequency change, atomically. This is with
> interrupts disabled everywhere /first/, and /without any additional
> locking/. That would prevent any sort of interaction from other CPUs -
> they'd all be sitting still with interrupts disabled.
>

Yup.

> Ingo

regards
gautham.
--
Gautham R Shenoy
Linux Technology Center
IBM India.
"Freedom comes with a price tag of responsibility, which is still a bargain,
because Freedom is priceless!"