Re: [PATCH v4 1/5] getcpu_cache system call: cache CPU number of running thread

----- On Feb 26, 2016, at 1:01 PM, Thomas Gleixner tglx-hfZtesqFncYOwBW4kG4KsQ@public.gmane.org wrote:

On Fri, 26 Feb 2016, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

quoted

----- On Feb 26, 2016, at 11:29 AM, Thomas Gleixner tglx-hfZtesqFncYOwBW4kG4KsQ@public.gmane.org wrote:

quoted

Right. There is no point in having two calls and two update mechanisms for a
very similar purpose.

So let userspace have one struct where cpu/seq and whatever is required for
rseq is located and flag at register time which parts of the struct need to be
updated.

If we put both cpu/seq/other in that structure, why not plan ahead and make
it extensible then ?

That looks very much like the "Thread-local ABI" series I posted last year.
See https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/12/22/464

Here is why I ended up introducing the specialized "getcpu_cache" system call
rather than the "generic" system call (quote from the getcpu_cache changelog):

    Rationale for the getcpu_cache system call rather than the thread-local
    ABI system call proposed earlier:
    
    Rather than doing a "generic" thread-local ABI, specialize this system
    call for a cpu number cache only. Anyway, the thread-local ABI approach
    would have required that we introduce "feature" flags, which would have
    ended up reimplementing multiplexing of features on top of a system
    call. It seems better to introduce one system call per feature instead.

If everyone end up preferring that we introduce a system call that implements
many features at once, that's indeed something we can do, but I remember
being told in the past that this is generally a bad idea.

It's a bad idea if you mix stuff which does not belong together, but if you
have stuff which shares a substantial amount of things then it makes a lot of
sense. Especially if it adds similar stuff into hotpathes.

quoted

For one thing, it would make the interface more cumbersome to deal with
from user-space in terms of feature detection: if we want to make this
interface extensible, in addition to check -1, errno=ENOSYS, userspace
would have to deal with a field containing the length of the structure
as expected by user-space and kernel, and feature flags to see the common
set of features supported by kernel and user-space.

Having one system call per feature seems simpler to handle in terms of
feature availability detection from a userspace point of view.

That might well be, but that does not justify two fastpath updates, two
seperate pointers to handle, etc ....

Keeping two separate pointers in the task_struct rather than a single one
might indeed be unwelcome, but I'm not sure I fully grasp the fast path
argument in this case: getcpu_cache only sets a notifier thread flag
on thread migration, whereas AFAIU rseq adds code to context switch and signal
delivery, which are prone to have a higher impact.

Indeed both will have their own code in the resume notifier, but is it really
a fast path ?

From my point of view, making it easy for userspace to just enable getcpu_cache

without having the scheduler and signal delivery fast-path overhead of rseq seems
like a good thing. I'm not all that sure that saving an extra pointer in
task_struct justifies the added system call interface complexity.

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com