Re: Patch for lost wakeups

[Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>]

On 08/11, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
>
> On 08/09, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > I guess that instead of a "smp_wmb()", we could do another
> > "smp_mb__before_spinlock()" thing, like we already allow for other
> > architectures to do a weaker form of mb in case the spinlock is
> > already a full mb. That would allow avoiding extra synchronization. Do
> > a
> >
> >    #ifndef smp_mb__before_spinlock
> >      #define smp_mb__before_spinlock() smp_wmb()
> >    #endif
> >
> > in <linux/spinlock.h> to not force everybody to implement it. Because
> > a wmb+acquire should be close enough to a full mb that nobody cares
> > (ok, so reads could move into the critical region from outside, but by
> > the time anybody has called "schedule()", I can't see it mattering, so
> > "close enough").
>
> Yes, this is what I tried to suggest. And of course we should turn that
> wmb() in try_to_wake_up() into smp_mb__before_spinlock().
>
> I event started the patch, but we already have smp_mb__after_lock(), so
> it should be smp_mb__before_lock() for consistency and we need to turn
> it to "define" too. Or change ARCH_HAS_SMP_MB_AFTER_LOCK, or add
> ARCH_HAS_SMP_MB_BEFORE_LOCK.

Ah, please ignore. According to /bin/grep smp_mb__before_lock() no longer
have users. So we can probably simply kill it in the same patch. I'll try
to write the changelog and send it tomorrow.

Oleg.