Hello, Linus.

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 09:27:03PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Seeing code like this

+       return &(*nr_running)[0];

just makes me go "WTF?"

I was going WTF too.  This was the smallest fix and I wanted to make
it minimal because there's another stack of patches on top of it.
Planning to just fold nr_running into worker_pool afterwards which
will remove the whole function.

Why are you taking the address of something you just dereferenced (the
"& [0]" part).

nr_running is atomic_t (*nr_running)[2].  Ignoring the pointer to
array part, it's just returning the address of N'th element of the
array.  ARRAY + N == &ARRAY[N].

And you actually do that *twice*, except the inner one is more
complicated. When you assign nr_runing, you take the address of it, so
the "*nr_running" is actually just the same kind of odd thing (except
in reverse - you take dereference something you just took the
address-of).

Seriously, this to me is a sign of *deeply* confused code. And the
fact that your first version of that code was buggy *EXACTLY* due to
this confusion should have made you take a step back.

Type-wise, I don't think it's confused.  Ah okay, you're looking at
the fifth patch in isolation.  Upto this point, the index is always 0.
I'm puttin it in as a placeholder for the next patch which makes use
of non-zero index.  This patch is supposed to prepare everything for
multiple pools and thus non-zero index.

As far as I can tell, what you actually want that function to do is:

  static atomic_t *get_pool_nr_running(struct worker_pool *pool)
  {
    int cpu = pool->gcwq->cpu;

    if (cpu != WORK_CPU_UNBOUND)
        return per_cpu(pool_nr_running, cpu);

    return unbound_pool_nr_running;
  }

More like the folloiwng in the end.

static atomic_t *get_pool_nr_running(struct worker_pool *pool)
{
	int cpu = pool->gcwq->cpu;
	int is_highpri = pool_is_highpri(pool);

	if (cpu != WORK_CPU_UNBOUND)
		return &per_cpu(pool_nr_running, cpu)[is_highpri];

	return &unbound_pool_nr_running[is_highpri];
}

I didn't test the code, btw. I just looked at the patch and went WTF.

Eh... yeah, with or without [2], this is WTF.  I'll just refresh it
with the above version.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun