linux/include
Paul E. McKenney 25502a6c13 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>
2010-05-10 11:08:33 -07:00
..
acpi acpi: Support IBM SMBus CMI devices 2010-03-24 14:38:37 +01:00
asm-generic dma-mapping: pci: move pci_set_dma_mask and pci_set_consistent_dma_mask to pci-dma-compat.h 2010-03-12 15:52:42 -08:00
crypto
drm Merge branch 'drm-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6 2010-05-07 14:02:01 -07:00
keys
linux rcu: refactor RCU's context-switch handling 2010-05-10 11:08:33 -07:00
math-emu
media V4L/DVB: saa7146: fix regression of the av7110/budget-av driver 2010-05-06 19:20:50 -03:00
mtd
net net: fix compile error due to double return type in SOCK_DEBUG 2010-05-02 13:42:39 -07:00
pcmcia pcmcia: pcmcia_dev_present bugfix 2010-04-21 08:09:17 +02:00
rdma Merge branch 'misc' into for-next 2010-03-01 23:52:31 -08:00
rxrpc
scsi include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
sound Merge branch 'fix/asoc' into for-linus 2010-04-07 09:54:41 +02:00
trace Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block 2010-04-09 11:50:29 -07:00
video broadsheetfb: support storing waveform 2010-03-12 15:52:34 -08:00
xen include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
Kbuild