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Commit 5b72f964 authored by Paul E. McKenney's avatar Paul E. McKenney
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rcu: Complain if blocking in preemptible RCU read-side critical section


Although preemptible RCU allows its read-side critical sections to be
preempted, general blocking is forbidden.  The reason for this is that
excessive preemption times can be handled by CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y, but a
voluntarily blocked task doesn't care how high you boost its priority.
Because preemptible RCU is a global mechanism, one ill-behaved reader
hurts everyone.  Hence the prohibition against general blocking in
RCU-preempt read-side critical sections.  Preemption yes, blocking no.

This commit enforces this prohibition.

There is a special exception for the -rt patchset (which they kindly
volunteered to implement):  It is OK to block (as opposed to merely being
preempted) within an RCU-preempt read-side critical section, but only if
the blocking is subject to priority inheritance.  This exception permits
CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y to get -rt RCU readers out of trouble.

Why doesn't this exception also apply to mainline's rt_mutex?  Because
of the possibility that someone does general blocking while holding
an rt_mutex.  Yes, the priority boosting will affect the rt_mutex,
but it won't help with the task doing general blocking while holding
that rt_mutex.

Reported-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
parent 881ec9d2
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