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authorTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>2012-08-20 14:51:23 -0700
committerTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>2012-08-20 14:51:23 -0700
commitdbf2576e37da0fcc7aacbfbb9fd5d3de7888a3c1 (patch)
treeabbebfe5aa155bda6ea41ab00e7f2c417e1eee6b /kernel/workqueue.c
parent044c782ce3a901fbd17cbe701c592f582381174d (diff)
workqueue: make all workqueues non-reentrant
By default, each per-cpu part of a bound workqueue operates separately and a work item may be executing concurrently on different CPUs. The behavior avoids some cross-cpu traffic but leads to subtle weirdities and not-so-subtle contortions in the API. * There's no sane usefulness in allowing a single work item to be executed concurrently on multiple CPUs. People just get the behavior unintentionally and get surprised after learning about it. Most either explicitly synchronize or use non-reentrant/ordered workqueue but this is error-prone. * flush_work() can't wait for multiple instances of the same work item on different CPUs. If a work item is executing on cpu0 and then queued on cpu1, flush_work() can only wait for the one on cpu1. Unfortunately, work items can easily cross CPU boundaries unintentionally when the queueing thread gets migrated. This means that if multiple queuers compete, flush_work() can't even guarantee that the instance queued right before it is finished before returning. * flush_work_sync() was added to work around some of the deficiencies of flush_work(). In addition to the usual flushing, it ensures that all currently executing instances are finished before returning. This operation is expensive as it has to walk all CPUs and at the same time fails to address competing queuer case. Incorrectly using flush_work() when flush_work_sync() is necessary is an easy error to make and can lead to bugs which are difficult to reproduce. * Similar problems exist for flush_delayed_work[_sync](). Other than the cross-cpu access concern, there's no benefit in allowing parallel execution and it's plain silly to have this level of contortion for workqueue which is widely used from core code to extremely obscure drivers. This patch makes all workqueues non-reentrant. If a work item is executing on a different CPU when queueing is requested, it is always queued to that CPU. This guarantees that any given work item can be executing on one CPU at maximum and if a work item is queued and executing, both are on the same CPU. The only behavior change which may affect workqueue users negatively is that non-reentrancy overrides the affinity specified by queue_work_on(). On a reentrant workqueue, the affinity specified by queue_work_on() is always followed. Now, if the work item is executing on one of the CPUs, the work item will be queued there regardless of the requested affinity. I've reviewed all workqueue users which request explicit affinity, and, fortunately, none seems to be crazy enough to exploit parallel execution of the same work item. This adds an additional busy_hash lookup if the work item was previously queued on a different CPU. This shouldn't be noticeable under any sane workload. Work item queueing isn't a very high-frequency operation and they don't jump across CPUs all the time. In a micro benchmark to exaggerate this difference - measuring the time it takes for two work items to repeatedly jump between two CPUs a number (10M) of times with busy_hash table densely populated, the difference was around 3%. While the overhead is measureable, it is only visible in pathological cases and the difference isn't huge. This change brings much needed sanity to workqueue and makes its behavior consistent with timer. I think this is the right tradeoff to make. This enables significant simplification of workqueue API. Simplification patches will follow. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel/workqueue.c')
-rw-r--r--kernel/workqueue.c13
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/kernel/workqueue.c b/kernel/workqueue.c
index de429ba000ee..c4feef9798ea 100644
--- a/kernel/workqueue.c
+++ b/kernel/workqueue.c
@@ -1225,14 +1225,15 @@ static void __queue_work(unsigned int cpu, struct workqueue_struct *wq,
cpu = raw_smp_processor_id();
/*
- * It's multi cpu. If @wq is non-reentrant and @work
- * was previously on a different cpu, it might still
- * be running there, in which case the work needs to
- * be queued on that cpu to guarantee non-reentrance.
+ * It's multi cpu. If @work was previously on a different
+ * cpu, it might still be running there, in which case the
+ * work needs to be queued on that cpu to guarantee
+ * non-reentrancy.
*/
gcwq = get_gcwq(cpu);
- if (wq->flags & WQ_NON_REENTRANT &&
- (last_gcwq = get_work_gcwq(work)) && last_gcwq != gcwq) {
+ last_gcwq = get_work_gcwq(work);
+
+ if (last_gcwq && last_gcwq != gcwq) {
struct worker *worker;
spin_lock(&last_gcwq->lock);