Re: Number of arguments in vmalloc.c

[Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@gmail.com>]

> On Dec 6, 2018, at 2:25 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 12:28:26AM -0800, Nadav Amit wrote:
>> [ +Peter ]
>> 
>> So I dug some more (I’m still not done), and found various trivial things
>> (e.g., storing zero extending u32 immediate is shorter for registers,
>> inlining already takes place).
>> 
>> *But* there is one thing that may require some attention - patch
>> b59167ac7bafd ("x86/percpu: Fix this_cpu_read()”) set ordering constraints
>> on the VM_ARGS() evaluation. And this patch also imposes, it appears,
>> (unnecessary) constraints on other pieces of code.
>> 
>> These constraints are due to the addition of the volatile keyword for
>> this_cpu_read() by the patch. This affects at least 68 functions in my
>> kernel build, some of which are hot (I think), e.g., finish_task_switch(),
>> smp_x86_platform_ipi() and select_idle_sibling().
>> 
>> Peter, perhaps the solution was too big of a hammer? Is it possible instead
>> to create a separate "this_cpu_read_once()” with the volatile keyword? Such
>> a function can be used for native_sched_clock() and other seqlocks, etc.
> 
> No. like the commit writes this_cpu_read() _must_ imply READ_ONCE(). If
> you want something else, use something else, there's plenty other
> options available.
> 
> There's this_cpu_op_stable(), but also __this_cpu_read() and
> raw_this_cpu_read() (which currently don't differ from this_cpu_read()
> but could).

Would setting the inline assembly memory operand both as input and output be
better than using the “volatile”?

I think that If you do that, the compiler would should the this_cpu_read()
as something that changes the per-cpu-variable, which would make it invalid
to re-read the value. At the same time, it would not prevent reordering the
read with other stuff.