From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
To: Halil Pasic <pasic@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Tony Krowiak <akrowiak@linux.ibm.com>,
linux-s390@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
borntraeger@de.ibm.com, cohuck@redhat.com,
pasic@linux.vnet.ibm.com, jjherne@linux.ibm.com,
alex.williamson@redhat.com, kwankhede@nvidia.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] s390/vfio-ap: control access to PQAP(AQIC) interception handler
Date: Thu, 20 May 2021 09:51:21 -0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210520125121.GX1002214@nvidia.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210520103829.0913b6de.pasic@linux.ibm.com>
On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 10:38:29AM +0200, Halil Pasic wrote:
> > It eliminates one atomic from a lock, but
> > if you go on to immediately do something like try_module_get, which
> > has an atomic inside, the whole thing is pointless (assuming
> > try_module_get was even the right thing to do)
>
> I'm not sure about this argument, or that RCU should be used only for
> highly performance sensitive read workloads.
Fundamentally RCU is a technique for building a read/write lock that
avoids an atomic incr on the read side. This comes at the cost of
significantly slowing down the write side.
Everything about RCU is very complicated, people typically use it
wrong.
People use it wrong so often than Paul wrote a very long list of
guidelines to help understand if it is being used properly:
Documentation/RCU/checklist.rst
If you haven't memorized this document then you probably shouldn't be
using RCU at all :)
> Can you please elaborate on the argument above and also put your
> statement in perspective with https://lwn.net/Articles/263130/?
This article doesn't talk much about the downsides - and focuses on
performance win. If you need the performance then sure use RCU, but
RCU is not a general purpose replacement for a rwsem. People should
*always* reach for a rwsem first. Design that properly and then ask
themselves if the rwsem can or should be optimized to a RCU.
> Yes a simple sleepable lock would work, and we wouldn't need
> get_module(). Because before the vfio_ap module unloads, it
> sets all vcpu->kvm->arch.crypto.pqap_hook instances to NULL. So if
> we know that vcpu->kvm->arch.crypto.pqap_hook then we know
> that the still have valid references to the module.
Yes
> But in my opinion RCU is also viable (not this patch). I think, I prefer
> a lock for simplicity, unless it is not (deadlocks) ;).
As soon as you said you needed to sleep RCU stopped being viable. To
make a sleepable region you need to do an atomic write and at that
instant all the value of RCU was destroyed - use a normal rwsem.
There is SRCU that solves the sleepable problem, but it has an
incredible cost in both write side performance and memory usage that
should only be reached for if high read side performance is really
required.
Jason
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-05-20 12:52 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-05-19 15:39 [PATCH v3 0/2] s390/vfio-ap: fix memory leak in mdev remove callback Tony Krowiak
2021-05-19 15:39 ` [PATCH v3 1/2] " Tony Krowiak
2021-05-19 15:39 ` [PATCH v3 2/2] s390/vfio-ap: control access to PQAP(AQIC) interception handler Tony Krowiak
2021-05-19 16:16 ` Jason Gunthorpe
2021-05-19 23:04 ` Tony Krowiak
2021-05-19 23:22 ` Jason Gunthorpe
2021-05-20 1:08 ` Tony Krowiak
2021-05-20 8:48 ` Halil Pasic
2021-05-20 12:26 ` Jason Gunthorpe
2021-05-20 8:38 ` Halil Pasic
2021-05-20 12:51 ` Jason Gunthorpe [this message]
2021-05-21 18:24 ` Tony Krowiak
2021-05-21 18:30 ` Jason Gunthorpe
2021-05-19 17:21 ` Halil Pasic
2021-05-19 23:14 ` Tony Krowiak
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20210520125121.GX1002214@nvidia.com \
--to=jgg@nvidia.com \
--cc=akrowiak@linux.ibm.com \
--cc=alex.williamson@redhat.com \
--cc=borntraeger@de.ibm.com \
--cc=cohuck@redhat.com \
--cc=jjherne@linux.ibm.com \
--cc=kwankhede@nvidia.com \
--cc=linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=linux-s390@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=pasic@linux.ibm.com \
--cc=pasic@linux.vnet.ibm.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.