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documentation: Present updated RCU guarantee

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Recent memory-model work deduces the relationships of RCU read-side
critical sections and grace periods based on the relationships of
accesses within a critical section and accesses preceding and following
the grace period.  This commit therefore adds this viewpoint.

Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul E. McKenney 2016-10-07 10:33:24 -07:00
parent 1001354ca3
commit e2c85cb12c
1 changed files with 24 additions and 1 deletions
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25
Documentation/RCU/Design/Requirements/Requirements.html
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@ -547,7 +547,7 @@ The <tt>rcu_access_pointer()</tt> on line&nbsp;6 is similar to
It could reuse a value formerly fetched from this same pointer.
It could also fetch the pointer from <tt>gp</tt> in a byte-at-a-time
manner, resulting in <i>load tearing</i>, in turn resulting a bytewise
mash-up of two distince pointer values.
mash-up of two distinct pointer values.
It might even use value-speculation optimizations, where it makes
a wrong guess, but by the time it gets around to checking the
value, an update has changed the pointer to match the wrong guess.
@ -659,6 +659,29 @@ systems with more than one CPU:
In other words, a given instance of <tt>synchronize_rcu()</tt>
can avoid waiting on a given RCU read-side critical section only
if it can prove that <tt>synchronize_rcu()</tt> started first.
<p>
A related question is &ldquo;When <tt>rcu_read_lock()</tt>
doesn't generate any code, why does it matter how it relates
to a grace period?&rdquo;
The answer is that it is not the relationship of
<tt>rcu_read_lock()</tt> itself that is important, but rather
the relationship of the code within the enclosed RCU read-side
critical section to the code preceding and following the
grace period.
If we take this viewpoint, then a given RCU read-side critical
section begins before a given grace period when some access
preceding the grace period observes the effect of some access
within the critical section, in which case none of the accesses
within the critical section may observe the effects of any
access following the grace period.
<p>
As of late 2016, mathematical models of RCU take this
viewpoint, for example, see slides&nbsp;62 and&nbsp;63
of the
<a href="http://www2.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/scalability/paper/LinuxMM.2016.10.04c.LCE.pdf">2016 LinuxCon EU</a>
presentation.
</font></td></tr>
<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
</table>