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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt | 20 |
1 files changed, 15 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt b/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt index accfe2f5247d..51525a30e8b4 100644 --- a/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt +++ b/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt @@ -11,7 +11,10 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome! structure is updated more than about 10% of the time, then you should strongly consider some other approach, unless detailed performance measurements show that RCU is nonetheless - the right tool for the job. + the right tool for the job. Yes, you might think of RCU + as simply cutting overhead off of the readers and imposing it + on the writers. That is exactly why normal uses of RCU will + do much more reading than updating. Another exception is where performance is not an issue, and RCU provides a simpler implementation. An example of this situation @@ -240,10 +243,11 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome! instead need to use synchronize_irq() or synchronize_sched(). 12. Any lock acquired by an RCU callback must be acquired elsewhere - with irq disabled, e.g., via spin_lock_irqsave(). Failing to - disable irq on a given acquisition of that lock will result in - deadlock as soon as the RCU callback happens to interrupt that - acquisition's critical section. + with softirq disabled, e.g., via spin_lock_irqsave(), + spin_lock_bh(), etc. Failing to disable irq on a given + acquisition of that lock will result in deadlock as soon as the + RCU callback happens to interrupt that acquisition's critical + section. 13. RCU callbacks can be and are executed in parallel. In many cases, the callback code simply wrappers around kfree(), so that this @@ -310,3 +314,9 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome! Because these primitives only wait for pre-existing readers, it is the caller's responsibility to guarantee safety to any subsequent readers. + +16. The various RCU read-side primitives do -not- contain memory + barriers. The CPU (and in some cases, the compiler) is free + to reorder code into and out of RCU read-side critical sections. + It is the responsibility of the RCU update-side primitives to + deal with this. |