Re: [PATCH 2/4] swait: add the missing killable swaits

Linus Torvalds
2017-06-29T18:59:29Z

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 11:33 AM, Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jun 2017, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> I actually think swait is pure garbage. Most users only wake up one
>> process anyway, and using swait for that is stupid. If you only wake
>> up one, you might as well just have a single process pointer, not a
>> wait list at all, and then use "wake_up_process()".
>
> But you still need the notion of a queue, even if you wake one task
> at a time... I'm probably missing your point here.

The *reason* they wake up only one seems to be that there really is
just one. It's some per-cpu idle thread for kvm, and for RCU it's the
RCU workqueue thread.

So the queue literally looks suspiciously pointless.

But I might be wrong, and there can actually be multiple entries. If
there are, I don't see why the wake-up-one semantics the code uses
would be valid, though.

Linus