Re: [PATCH v3] virtio_balloon: Convert "vballoon" kthread into a workqueue

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 06:47:11PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > There's cancel_work_sync() to stop the self-requeueing ones.
> 
> What happens if queue_work runs while cancel_work_sync is in progress?
> Does it fail to queue?

cancel_work_sync() is guaranteed to take self-requeueing work items no
matter when it's called or what's going on.  External (non-self)
queueings of course should be stopped in other ways.

> > > From that POV a dedicated WQ kept it simple.
> > 
> > A dedicated wq doesn't do anything for that.  You can't shut down a
> > workqueue with a pending work item on it.  destroy_workqueue() will
> > try to drain the target wq, warn if it doesn't finish in certain
> > number of iterations and just keep trying indefinitely.
> > 
> > Thanks.
> 
> Right, so eventually we'll stop requeueuing and it will succeed?

Yeah, sure, it's a silly reason to use a separate workqueue tho.
Don't do it that way.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun