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documentation: Document call_rcu() safety mechanisms and limitations

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The call_rcu() family of primitives will take action to accelerate
grace periods when the number of callbacks pending on a given CPU
becomes excessive.  Although this safety mechanism can be useful,
it is no substitute for users of call_rcu() having rate-limit controls
in place.  This commit adds this nuance to the documentation.

Reported-by: "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
This commit is contained in:
Paul E. McKenney 2013-12-05 14:56:54 -08:00
parent 6d0abeca32
commit 6e67669678
1 changed files with 13 additions and 5 deletions
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18
Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt
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@ -256,10 +256,10 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
variations on this theme.
b. Limiting update rate. For example, if updates occur only
once per hour, then no explicit rate limiting is required,
unless your system is already badly broken. The dcache
subsystem takes this approach -- updates are guarded
by a global lock, limiting their rate.
once per hour, then no explicit rate limiting is
required, unless your system is already badly broken.
Older versions of the dcache subsystem take this approach,
guarding updates with a global lock, limiting their rate.
c. Trusted update -- if updates can only be done manually by
superuser or some other trusted user, then it might not
@ -268,7 +268,8 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
the machine.
d. Use call_rcu_bh() rather than call_rcu(), in order to take
advantage of call_rcu_bh()'s faster grace periods.
advantage of call_rcu_bh()'s faster grace periods. (This
is only a partial solution, though.)
e. Periodically invoke synchronize_rcu(), permitting a limited
number of updates per grace period.
@ -276,6 +277,13 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
The same cautions apply to call_rcu_bh(), call_rcu_sched(),
call_srcu(), and kfree_rcu().
Note that although these primitives do take action to avoid memory
exhaustion when any given CPU has too many callbacks, a determined
user could still exhaust memory. This is especially the case
if a system with a large number of CPUs has been configured to
offload all of its RCU callbacks onto a single CPU, or if the
system has relatively little free memory.
9. All RCU list-traversal primitives, which include
rcu_dereference(), list_for_each_entry_rcu(), and
list_for_each_safe_rcu(), must be either within an RCU read-side