Re: [PATCH 1/4] mm/rmap: per anon_vma lock

Peter Zijlstra
2013-11-01T10:15:24Z

On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 06:07:07PM +0800, Yuanhan Liu wrote:
> > I also want to point out that lately we've seen several changes sent
> > out that relax locking with no accompanying explanation of why the
> > relaxed locking would be safe. Please don't do that - having a lot of
> > performance data is worthless if you can't explain why the new locking
> > is safe.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > And I'm not asking to prove a negative ('lack of any possible
> > races') there, but at least in this case one could dig out why the
> > root anon vma locking was introduced and if they think that this
> > reason doesn't apply anymore, explain why...
>
> It was introduced by commit 2b575eb6(And, BTW, I'm sorry that this commit log
> about bb4aa39676f is wrong)
>
> commit 2b575eb64f7a9c701fb4bfdb12388ac547f6c2b6
> Author: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> Date: Tue May 24 17:12:11 2011 -0700
>
> mm: convert anon_vma->lock to a mutex
>
> Straightforward conversion of anon_vma->lock to a mutex.
>
> As you can see, Peter didn't tell why before. Honestly speaking, that
> was my originaly concern as well. I tried to find some possible races;
> I guess I may miss something.

Bullshit; I didn't change the locking. I only changed the lock primitive
from a spinlock to a mutex. The anon_vma->root->lock is completely
unrelated to this change.