Re: [Cbe-oss-dev] powerpc/cell/oprofile: fix mutex locking for spu-oprofile
From: Carl Love <hidden>
Date: 2008-08-21 14:59:49
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On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 20:20 +1000, Michael Ellerman wrote:
On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 10:14 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:quoted
On Thursday 21 August 2008, Paul Mackerras wrote:quoted
Arnd Bergmann writes:quoted
Paul, any chance we can still get this into 2.6.27?Possibly. We'll need a really good explanation for Linus as to why this is needed (what regression or serious bug this fixes) and why it is late. Can you send me something explaining that?The patch does not fix a regression, the spu-oprofile code basically never worked. With the current code in Linux, samples in the profile buffer can get corrupted because reader and writer to that buffer use different locks for accessing it.Actually for me it worked[1] a reasonable amount of the time, enough to be useful. So the spu-oprofile code has always been broken in this way, but it's not always fatal. So the patch doesn't fix a regression, but it fixes a serious user-visible bug, which makes it legit rc4 material IMHO. [1] that was late last year, so possibly a kernel or two ago.
The bug came in the original OProfile SPU support that was put out about 2 years ago. The way the code was there was a window in which you may get corruption. It was not until Jan 08 when we got the first report of the bug from Michael and identified it. Since then there have been three or four more people who have hit and reported the bug. I am seeing the bug show up more frequently with the latest couple of weekly SDK 3.1 kernels. It would seem that the kernel may have changed such that the timing is more likely to hit the bug. For the Beta SDK 3.1 release the IVT team was not able to complete their OProfile testing due to the bug.
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