Re: [PATCH 2/3] arm64: smp: Implement cpus_has_pending_ipi()

Mark Rutland
2025-10-10T09:55:38Z

On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 10:30:11AM +0200, Ulf Hansson wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Oct 2025 at 17:55, Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 03 Oct 2025 16:02:44 +0100,
> > Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson@linaro.org> wrote:
> > > To add support for keeping track of whether there may be a pending IPI
> > > scheduled for a CPU or a group of CPUs, let's implement
> > > cpus_has_pending_ipi() for arm64.
> > >
> > > Note, the implementation is intentionally lightweight and doesn't use any
> > > additional lock. This is good enough for cpuidle based decisions.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson@linaro.org>

> > > +bool cpus_has_pending_ipi(const struct cpumask *mask)
> > > +{
> > > + unsigned int cpu;
> > > +
> > > + for_each_cpu(cpu, mask) {
> > > + if (per_cpu(pending_ipi, cpu))
> > > + return true;
> > > + }
> > > + return false;
> > > +}
> > > +
> >
> > The lack of memory barriers makes me wonder how reliable this is.
> > Maybe this is relying on the IPIs themselves acting as such, but
> > that's extremely racy no matter how you look at it.
>
> It's deliberately lightweight. I am worried about introducing
> locking/barriers, as those could be costly and introduce latencies in
> these paths.

I think the concern is that the naming implies a precise semantic that
the code doesn't actually provide. As written and commented, this
function definitely has false positives and false negatives.

The commit message says "This is good enough for cpuidle based
decisions", but doesn't say what those decisions require nor why this is
good enough.

If false positives and/or false negatives are ok, add a comment block
above the function to mention that those are acceptable. Presumably
there's some boundary at which incorrectness is not acceptable (e.g. if
it's wrong 50% of the time), and we'd want to understand how we can
ensure that we're the right side of that boundary.

Mark.