On 20.06.2017 22:37, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Nikolay.
>
> On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 09:02:00PM +0300, Nikolay Borisov wrote:
>> Currently the writeback statistics code uses a percpu counters to hold
>> various statistics. Furthermore we have 2 families of functions - those which
>> disable local irq and those which doesn't and whose names begin with
>> double underscore. However, they both end up calling __add_wb_stats which in
>> turn calls percpu_counter_add_batch which is already irq-safe.
>
> Heh, looks like I was confused. __percpu_counter_add() is not
> irq-safe. It disables preemption and uses __this_cpu_read(), so
> there's no protection against irq. If writeback statistics want
> irq-safe operations and it does, it would need these separate
> operations. Am I missing something?
So looking at the history of the commit initially there was
preempt_disable + this_cpu_ptr which was later changed in:
819a72af8d66 ("percpucounter: Optimize __percpu_counter_add a bit
through the use of this_cpu() options.")
I believe that having __this_cpu_read ensures that we get an atomic
snapshot of the variable but when we are doing the actual write e.g. the
else {} branch we actually use this_cpu_add which ought to be preempt +
irq safe, meaning we won't get torn write. In essence we have atomic
reads by merit of __this_cpu_read + atomic writes by merit of using
raw_spin_lock_irqsave in the if() branch and this_cpu_add in the else {}
branch.
>
> Thanks.
>
