Re: [PATCH] adapt page_lock_anon_vma() to PREEMPT_RCU

Paul E. McKenney
2007-02-27T23:13:22Z

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 12:25:17PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:06:21 +0300 Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru> wrote:
> > page_lock_anon_vma() uses spin_lock() to block RCU. This doesn't work with
> > PREEMPT_RCU, we have to do rcu_read_lock() explicitely. Otherwise, it is
> > theoretically possible that slab returns anon_vma's memory to the system
> > before we do spin_unlock(&anon_vma->lock).
> >
> > ...
> >
> > +static void page_unlock_anon_vma(struct anon_vma *anon_vma)
> > +{
> > + spin_unlock(&anon_vma->lock);
> > + rcu_read_unlock();
> > }
>
> It's a bit sad doing a double preempt_disable() for non-PREEMPT_RCU builds.
>
> Perhaps we would benefit from a new rcu_read_lock_preempt_rcu() which is a
> no-op if !PREEMPT_RCU.

We were doing double preempt_disable() before as well. The only
difference is that we moved RCU preempt_enable() (it used to be inside the
critical section, and now it is after the corresponding spin_unlock()).

I hope to keep RCU API proliferation down to a dull roar, but if we
need more APIs, we need more APIs. This example does not demonstrate
that need to me, however.

Thanx, Paul