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From: "Timo Teräs" <timo.teras@iki•fi>
To: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor•apana.org.au>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft•net>, netdev@vger•kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 1/2] flow: virtualize get and entry deletion methods
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:23:02 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4BB08D96.8090909@iki.fi> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20100329111025.GA23927@gondor.apana.org.au>

Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 01:36:40PM +0300, Timo Teräs wrote:
>>>> We can still drop the locking, as ->dead can be made atomic_t.
>>> No it doesn't need to be atomic, reading an int is always atomic.
>> The only reason why it needs to be atomic is because of
>> xfrm_policy_kill() which writes '1' and checks if it was zero
>> previously. Since the idea is to get rid of the policy lock, we
>> can turn ->dead flag to atomic_t and use atomic_xchg for that.
>> Otherwise it would be ok to have it as just regular int.
> 
> I don't see the point.  As long as the data paths do not take
> the lock changing this doesn't buy us much.  You're still making
> that cacheline exclusive.

To my understanding declaring an atomic_t, or reading it with
atomic_read does not make cache line exclusive. Only the atomic_*
writing to it take the cache line. And since this is done exactly
once for policy (or it's a bug/warn thingy) it does not impose
significant performance issue.

But looking at the code more. The check should not be needed.
xfrm_policy_kill() is only called if the entry is removed from
the hash list, which can happen only once.

Do you think we can just change it to unconditionally writing
to "policy->walk.dead = 1;" and be done with that?

Alternatively, we can move the ->dead check to be done while
holding the hash lock to guarantee no one else is writing
simultaneously.

  reply	other threads:[~2010-03-29 11:23 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-03-25  9:24 [PATCH RFC 0/2] caching bundles instead of policies Timo Teras
2010-03-25  9:24 ` [PATCH RFC 1/2] flow: virtualize get and entry deletion methods Timo Teras
2010-03-25 19:26   ` David Miller
2010-03-26  6:17     ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29  8:40     ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29  9:00       ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29  9:09         ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 10:07           ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29 10:26             ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 10:36               ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29 11:10                 ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 11:23                   ` Timo Teräs [this message]
2010-03-29 11:32                     ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 11:39                       ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29 11:57                         ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 12:03                           ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29 12:11                             ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 12:20                               ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29 12:25                                 ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-29 12:33                                   ` Timo Teräs
2010-03-29 12:45                                     ` Herbert Xu
2010-03-25  9:24 ` [PATCH RFC 2/2] xfrm: cache bundles instead of policies for outgoing flows Timo Teras

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