Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] sched/task: Add the put_task_struct_atomic_safe function

Valentin Schneider
2023-01-30T14:47:51Z

On 30/01/23 08:49, Wander Lairson Costa wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 12:55 PM Valentin Schneider <vschneid@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 23/01/23 14:24, Wander Lairson Costa wrote:
>> > Therefore (if I am correct in my assumption), it would make sense for
>> > only some call sites to pay the overhead price for it. But this is
>> > just a guess, and I have no evidence to support my claim.
>>
>> My worry here is that it's easy to miss problematic callgraphs, and it's
>> potentially easy for new ones to creep in. Having a solution within
>> put_task_struct() itself would prevent that.
>>
>
> We could add a WARN_ON statement in put_task_struct() to detect such cases.
>

Anyone running their kernel with DEBUG_ATOMIC_SLEEP should be able to
detect misuse, but it doesn't change that some callgraphs will only
materialize under certain hardware/configuration combos.

>> Another thing, if you look at release_task_stack(), it either caches the
>> outgoing stack for later use, or frees it via RCU (regardless of
>> PREEMPT_RT). Perhaps we could follow that and just always punt the freeing
>> of the task struct to RCU?
>>
>
> That's a point. Do you mean doing that even for !PREEMPT_RT?

Could be worth a try? I think because of the cache thing the task stack is
a bit less aggressive wrt RCU callback processing, but at a quick glance I
don't see any fundamental reason why the task_struct itself can't be given
the same treatment.