Subject: Re: [PATCH UPDATED 1/3] vhost: replace vhost_workqueue with per-vhost kthread

From: "Michael S. Tsirkin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:59:04 +0300

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 09:31:58PM +0200, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 07/26/2010 09:14 PM, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > On 07/26/2010 06:51 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >> I noticed that with vhost, flush_work was getting the worker
> >> pointer as well. Can we live with this API change?
> > 
> > Yeah, the flushing mechanism wouldn't work reliably if the work is
> > queued to a different worker without flushing, so yeah passing in
> > @worker might actually be better.
> 
> Thinking a bit more about it, it kind of sucks that queueing to
> another worker from worker->func() breaks flush.  Maybe the right
> thing to do there is using atomic_t for done_seq?  It pays a bit more
> overhead but maybe that's justifiable to keep the API saner?  It would
> be great if it can be fixed somehow even if it means that the work has
> to be separately flushed for each worker it has been on before being
> destroyed.
> 
> Or, if flushing has to be associated with a specific worker anyway,
> maybe it would be better to move the sequence counter to
> kthread_worker and do it similarly with the original workqueue so that
> work can be destroyed once execution starts?  Then, it can at least
> remain semantically identical to the original workqueue.
> 
> Thanks.

This last sounds sane: in fact I didn't know there is any difference.

> -- 
> tejun