Re: [PATCH 1/3] workqueues: change cancel_work_sync() to clear work->data

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello,

On 02/25/2010 05:20 AM, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> In short: change cancel_work_sync(work) to mark this work as "never
> queued" upon return.
> 
> When cancel_work_sync(work) succeeds, we know that this work can't be
> queued or running, and since we own WORK_STRUCT_PENDING nobody can change
> the bits in work->data under us. This means we can also clear the "cwq"
> part along with _PENDING bit lockless before return, unless the work is
> queued nobody can assume get_wq_data() is stable even under cwq->lock.
> 
> This change can speedup the subsequent cancel/flush requests, and as
> Dmitry pointed out this simplifies the usage of work_struct's which
> can be queued on different workqueues. Consider this pseudo code from
> the input subsystem:
> 
> 	struct workqueue_struct *WQ;
> 	struct work_struct *WORK;
> 
> 	for (;;) {
> 		WQ = create_workqueue();
> 		...
> 		if (condition())
> 			queue_work(WQ, WORK);
> 		...
> 		cancel_work_sync(WORK);
> 		destroy_workqueue(WQ);
> 	}
> 
> If condition() returns T and then F, cancel_work_sync() will crash the
> kernel because WORK->data still points to the already destroyed workqueue.
> With this patch the code like above becomes correct.
> 
> Suggested-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>
> Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>

Yeap, generally looks good to me and I've been doing similar things to
implement non-reentrant workqueues (records the last cpu a work was on
in work->dataa after the work is dispatched to a worker thread).  I'll
add this to the series.

Thank you.

-- 
tejun