rcu: refactor RCU's context-switch handling

The addition of preemptible RCU to treercu resulted in a bit of
confusion and inefficiency surrounding the handling of context switches
for RCU-sched and for RCU-preempt.  For RCU-sched, a context switch
is a quiescent state, pure and simple, just like it always has been.
For RCU-preempt, a context switch is in no way a quiescent state, but
special handling is required when a task blocks in an RCU read-side
critical section.

However, the callout from the scheduler and the outer loop in ksoftirqd
still calls something named rcu_sched_qs(), whose name is no longer
accurate.  Furthermore, when rcu_check_callbacks() notes an RCU-sched
quiescent state, it ends up unnecessarily (though harmlessly, aside
from the performance hit) enqueuing the current task if it happens to
be running in an RCU-preempt read-side critical section.  This not only
increases the maximum latency of scheduler_tick(), it also needlessly
increases the overhead of the next outermost rcu_read_unlock() invocation.

This patch addresses this situation by separating the notion of RCU's
context-switch handling from that of RCU-sched's quiescent states.
The context-switch handling is covered by rcu_note_context_switch() in
general and by rcu_preempt_note_context_switch() for preemptible RCU.
This permits rcu_sched_qs() to handle quiescent states and only quiescent
states.  It also reduces the maximum latency of scheduler_tick(), though
probably by much less than a microsecond.  Finally, it means that tasks
within preemptible-RCU read-side critical sections avoid incurring the
overhead of queuing unless there really is a context switch.

Suggested-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>

2 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/rcutiny.h b/include/linux/rcutiny.h
index bbeb55b7709b..ff22b97fb979 100644
--- a/include/linux/rcutiny.h
+++ b/include/linux/rcutiny.h
@@ -29,6 +29,10 @@
 
 void rcu_sched_qs(int cpu);
 void rcu_bh_qs(int cpu);
+static inline void rcu_note_context_switch(int cpu)
+{
+	rcu_sched_qs(cpu);
+}
 
 #define __rcu_read_lock()	preempt_disable()
 #define __rcu_read_unlock()	preempt_enable()
diff --git a/include/linux/rcutree.h b/include/linux/rcutree.h
index 7484fe66a3aa..b9f74606f320 100644
--- a/include/linux/rcutree.h
+++ b/include/linux/rcutree.h
@@ -34,6 +34,7 @@ struct notifier_block;
 
 extern void rcu_sched_qs(int cpu);
 extern void rcu_bh_qs(int cpu);
+extern void rcu_note_context_switch(int cpu);
 extern int rcu_needs_cpu(int cpu);
 extern int rcu_expedited_torture_stats(char *page);