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Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:53:47 -0800
From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
To: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
       Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
       LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
       Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
       James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>, David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [patch 0/9] Fix various __task_cred related invalid RCU
	assumptions
Message-ID: <20091214015347.GB7710@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reply-To: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
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On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 07:56:17PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 21:34 -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> 
> > Ah -- I have a related lockdep question.  Is there a primitive that says
> > whether or not the current task holds at least one lock of any type?
> > If so, I would like to make rcu_dereference() do at least a little crude
> > checking for this problem.
> 
> Hmm, no, but that's not hard to do, however I actually implemented
> something like that for RCU a long while ago and that gives a metric TON
> of false positives due to things like the radix tree which are RCU-safe
> but are not required to be used with RCU.

Understood -- my current guess is that there needs to be a way to tag
a variant of the rcu_dereference() API with the conditions that must be
met, for example, either in an rcu-sched read-side critical section or
holding a specific type of lock.

This does make it a little harder to retroactively add checking to
existing calls to rcu_dereference(), but should allow a good balance
between false positives and false negatives going forward.

Seem reasonable, or am I still missing something?

							Thanx, Paul