user/sven/linux.git/Documentation/RCU, branch v3.4.70

rcu: Call out dangers of expedited RCU primitives

2012-02-21T17:06:08Z

The expedited RCU primitives can be quite useful, but they have some high costs as well. This commit updates and creates docbook comments calling out the costs, and updates the RCU documentation as well. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Rework detection of use of RCU by offline CPUs

2012-02-21T17:06:07Z

Because newly offlined CPUs continue executing after completing the CPU_DYING notifiers, they legitimately enter the scheduler and use RCU while appearing to be offline. This calls for a more sophisticated approach as follows: 1. RCU marks the CPU online during the CPU_UP_PREPARE phase. 2. RCU marks the CPU offline during the CPU_DEAD phase. 3. Diagnostics regarding use of read-side RCU by offline CPUs use RCU's accounting rather than the cpu_online_map. (Note that __call_rcu() still uses cpu_online_map to detect illegal invocations within CPU_DYING notifiers.) 4. Offline CPUs are prevented from hanging the system by force_quiescent_state(), which pays attention to cpu_online_map. Some additional work (in a later commit) will be needed to guarantee that force_quiescent_state() waits a full jiffy before assuming that a CPU is offline, for example, when called from idle entry. (This commit also makes the one-jiffy wait explicit, since the old-style implicit wait can now be defeated by RCU_FAST_NO_HZ and by rcutorture.) This approach avoids the false positives encountered when attempting to use more exact classification of CPU online/offline state. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Update stall-warning documentation

2012-02-21T17:03:52Z

Add documentation of CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_VERBOSE, CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_INFO, and RCU_STALL_DELAY_DELTA. Describe multiple stall-warning messages from a single stall, and the timing of the subsequent messages. Add headings. Remove RCU_SECONDS_TILL_STALL_RECHECK because this value is now computed at runtime from RCU_CPU_STALL_TIMEOUT, so that sysfs changes to the timeout value now directly affect the RCU_SECONDS_TILL_STALL_RECHECK value. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Add CPU-stall capability to rcutorture

2012-02-21T17:03:52Z

Add module parameters to rcutorture that induce a CPU stall. The stall_cpu parameter specifies how long to stall in seconds, defaulting to zero, which indicates no stalling is to be undertaken. The stall_cpu_holdoff parameter specifies how many seconds after insmod (or boot, if rcutorture is built into the kernel) that this stall is to start. The default value for stall_cpu_holdoff is ten seconds. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Make documentation give more realistic rcutorture duration

2012-02-21T17:03:51Z

The torture.txt documentation gives an example rcutorture run with a 100-second duration. This is ridiculously short, unless maybe testing a fix for a egregious bug. Use a more-realistic one-hour duration for the example. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcutorture: Permit holding off CPU-hotplug operations during boot

2012-02-21T17:03:50Z

When rcutorture is started automatically at boot time, it might well also start CPU-hotplug operations at that time, which might not be desirable. This commit therefore adds an rcutorture parameter that allows CPU-hotplug operations to be held off for the specified number of seconds after the start of boot. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Bring RTFP.txt up to date.

2012-02-21T17:03:21Z

Add publications from 2010 and 2011 to RTFP.txt. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

docs: Additional LWN links to RCU API

2011-12-11T18:32:23Z

Tyler Hicks pointed me at an additional article on RCU and I figured it should probably be mentioned with the others. Signed-off-by: Kees Cook Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Add rcutorture CPU-hotplug capability

2011-12-11T18:31:56Z

Running CPU-hotplug operations concurrently with rcutorture has historically been a good way to find bugs in both RCU and CPU hotplug. This commit therefore adds an rcutorture module parameter called "onoff_interval" that causes a randomly selected CPU-hotplug operation to be executed at the specified interval, in seconds. The default value of "onoff_interval" is zero, which disables rcutorture-instigated CPU-hotplug operations. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

rcu: Add rcutorture system-shutdown capability

2011-12-11T18:31:46Z

Although it is easy to run rcutorture tests under KVM, there is currently no nice way to run such a test for a fixed time period, collect all of the rcutorture data, and then shut the system down cleanly. This commit therefore adds an rcutorture module parameter named "shutdown_secs" that specified the run duration in seconds, after which rcutorture terminates the test and powers the system down. The default value for "shutdown_secs" is zero, which disables shutdown. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney