Re: [RESEND PATCH v7 2/7] arm64: barrier: Support smp_cond_load_relaxed_timeout()

Ankur Arora
2025-10-28T18:01:53Z

Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 28, 2025, at 06:31, Ankur Arora wrote:
>> Support waiting in smp_cond_load_relaxed_timeout() via
>> __cmpwait_relaxed(). Limit this to when the event-stream is enabled,
>> to ensure that we wake from WFE periodically and don't block forever
>> if there are no stores to the cacheline.
>>
>> In the unlikely event that the event-stream is unavailable, fallback
>> to spin-waiting.
>>
>> Also set SMP_TIMEOUT_POLL_COUNT to 1 so we do the time-check for each
>> iteration in smp_cond_load_relaxed_timeout().
>
> After I looked at the entire series again, this one feels like
> a missed opportunity. Especially on low-power systems but possibly
> on any ARMv9.2+ implementation including Cortex-A320, it would
> be nice to be able to both turn off the event stream and also
> make this function take fewer wakeups:
>
>> +/* Re-declared here to avoid include dependency. */
>> +extern bool arch_timer_evtstrm_available(void);
>> +
>> +#define cpu_poll_relax(ptr, val) \
>> +do { \
>> + if (arch_timer_evtstrm_available()) \
>> + __cmpwait_relaxed(ptr, val); \
>> + else \
>> + cpu_relax(); \
>> +} while (0)
>> +
>
> Since the caller knows exactly how long it wants to wait for,
> we should be able to fit a 'wfet' based primitive in here and
> pass the timeout as another argument.

Per se, I don't disagree with this when it comes to WFET.

Handling a timeout, however, is messier when we use other mechanisms.

Some problems that came up in my earlier discussions with Catalin:

- when using WFE, we also need some notion of slack
- and if a caller specifies only a small or no slack, then we need
to combine WFE+cpu_relax()

- for platforms that only use a polling primitive, we want to check
the clock only intermittently for power reasons.
Now, this could be done with an architecture specific spin-count.
However, if the caller specifies a small slack, then we might need
to we check the clock more often as we get closer to the deadline etc.

A smaller problem was that different users want different clocks and so
folding the timeout in a 'timeout_cond_expr' lets us do away with the
interface having to handle any of that.

I had earlier versions [v2] [v3] which had rather elaborate policies for
handling timeout, slack etc. But, given that the current users of the
interface don't actually care about precision, all of that seemed
a little overengineered.

[v2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250502085223.1316925-1-ankur.a.arora@oracle.com/#r
[v3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250627044805.945491-1-ankur.a.arora@oracle.com/

--
ankur