Thread (33 messages) 33 messages, 3 authors, 2016-06-29

Re: [PATCH v9 05/12] kthread: Add kthread_create_worker*()

From: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Date: 2016-06-20 19:55:54
Also in: linux-mm, lkml

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 01:17:24PM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
Kthread workers are currently created using the classic kthread API,
namely kthread_run(). kthread_worker_fn() is passed as the @threadfn
parameter.

This patch defines kthread_create_worker() and
kthread_create_worker_on_cpu() functions that hide implementation details.

They enforce using kthread_worker_fn() for the main thread. But I doubt
that there are any plans to create any alternative. In fact, I think
that we do not want any alternative main thread because it would be
hard to support consistency with the rest of the kthread worker API.

The naming and function of kthread_create_worker() is inspired by
the workqueues API like the rest of the kthread worker API.

The kthread_create_worker_on_cpu() variant is motivated by the original
kthread_create_on_cpu(). Note that we need to bind per-CPU kthread
workers already when they are created. It makes the life easier.
kthread_bind() could not be used later for an already running worker.

This patch does _not_ convert existing kthread workers. The kthread worker
API need more improvements first, e.g. a function to destroy the worker.

IMPORTANT:

kthread_create_worker_on_cpu() allows to use any format of the
worker name, in compare with kthread_create_on_cpu(). The good thing
is that it is more generic. The bad thing is that most users will
need to pass the cpu number in two parameters, e.g.
kthread_create_worker_on_cpu(cpu, "helper/%d", cpu).

To be honest, the main motivation was to avoid the need for an
empty va_list. The only legal way was to create a helper function that
would be called with an empty list. Other attempts caused compilation
warnings or even errors on different architectures.

There were also other alternatives, for example, using #define or
splitting __kthread_create_worker(). The used solution looked
like the least ugly.

Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Acked-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>

Thanks.

-- 
tejun

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