Re: workqueue thing

Peter Zijlstra
2009-12-18T15:41:37Z

On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 07:30 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Fri, 18 Dec 2009, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> > > r1. The first design goal of cmwq is solving the issues the current
> > > workqueue implementation has including hard to detect
> > > deadlocks,
> >
> > lockdep is quite proficient at finding these these days.
>
> I don't think so.
>
> The reason it is not is that workqueues fundamentally do _different_
> things in the same context, adn lockdep has no clue what-so-ever.
>
> IOW, if you hold a lock, and then do 'flush_workqueue()', lockdep has no
> idea that maybe one of the entries on a workqueue might need the lock that
> you are holding. But I don't think lockdep sees the dependency that gets
> created by the flush - because it's not a direct code execution
> dependency.
>
> It's not a deadlock _directly_ due to lock ordering, but indirectly due to
> waiting for unrelated code that needs locks.
>
> Now, maybe lockdep could be _taught_ to consider workqueues themselves to
> be 'locks', and ordering those pseudo-locks wrt the real locks they take.
> So if workqueue Q takes lock A, the fact that it is _taken_ in a workqueue
> makes the ordering be Q->A. Then, if somebody does a "flush_workqueue"
> while holding lock B, the flush implies a "lock ordering" of B->Q (where
> "Q" is the set of all workqueues that could be flushed).

That's exactly what it does..

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