* Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 04:21:08PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 09:06:05AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > * Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > > In any case, its all moot now, since Paul no longer requires schedule()
> > > > to imply
> > > > a full barrier.
> > > >
> > > > [...]
> > >
> > > Nevertheless from a least-surprise POV it might be worth guaranteeing it,
> > > because I bet there's tons of code that assumes that schedule() is a
> > > heavy
> > > operation and it's such an easy mistake to make. Since we are so close to
> > > having that guarantee, we might as well codify it?
> >
> > FWIW, the arm64 __switch_to() has a heavy barrier (DSB) but the reason for
> > this was to cope with potentially interrupted cache or TLB maintenance
> > (which
> > require a DSB on the same CPU) and thread migration to another CPU.
>
> Right, but there's a path through schedule() that does not pass through
> __switch_to(); when we pick the current task as the most eligible task and
> next
> == prev.
>
> In that case there really only is the wmb, a spin lock, an atomic op and a
> spin
> unlock (and a whole bunch of 'normal' code of course).
Yeah, so my concern is that this is a rare race that might be 'surprising' for
developers relying on various schedule() constructs. Especially as it's a full
barrier on x86 (the most prominent SMP platform at the moment) there's a real
danger of hard to debug bugs creeping to other architectures.
So I think we should just do the small step of making it a full barrier
everywhere
- it's very close to it in any case, and it shouldn't really matter for
performance. Agreed?
Thanks,
Ingo
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