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  • Paul E. McKenney's avatar
    rcu: refactor RCU's context-switch handling · 25502a6c
    Paul E. McKenney authored
    
    
    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: default avatarLai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarLai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    25502a6c