lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2012]   [Jan]   [7]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: [PATCH v5 7/8] mm: Only IPI CPUs to drain local pages if they exist
On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 08:52:01AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 04:17:39PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 02:40:11PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 02:20:17PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
>
> [ . . . ]
>
> > > I've been chasing that patch and getting no replies what so
> > > ever from folk like Peter, Thomas and Ingo.
> > >
> > > The problem affects all IPI-raising functions, which mask with
> > > cpu_online_mask directly.
> >
> > Actually, in one sense I'm glad to hear it because from my brief
> > poking around, I was having trouble understanding why we were always
> > safe from sending IPIs to CPUs in the process of being offlined.
>
> The trick is to disable preemption (not interrupts!) across the IPI, which
> prevents CPU-hotplug's stop_machine() from running. You also have to
> have checked that the CPU is online within this same preemption-disabled
> section of code. This means that the outgoing CPU has to accept IPIs
> even after its CPU_DOWN_PREPARE notifier has been called -- right up
> to the stop_machine() call to take_cpu_down().

Of course, another trick is to hold the CPU-hotplug lock across the IPI,
but this is quite a bit more heavy-weight than disabling preemption.

Thanx, Paul



\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2012-01-07 18:09    [W:0.091 / U:1.040 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site