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Date: Wed, 23 May 2018 10:19:34 +0200
From: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: psodagud@codeaurora.org, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
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        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: write_lock_irq(&tasklist_lock)
Message-ID: <20180523081934.GT12217@hirez.programming.kicks-ass.net>
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On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 02:31:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 2:17 PM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> 
> > qrwlock is a fair lock and should not exhibit writer starvation.
> 
> We actually have a special rule to make it *not* be fair, in that
> interrupts are allowed to take the read lock if there are readers - even if
> there are waiting writers.

Urgh, right.. would be interesting to know how much of that is happening
in that workload. I assumed the readers were mostly due to the syscalls
the reporter talked about, and those should not trigger that case.

> > You basically want to spin-wait with interrupts enabled, right?
> 
> That was the intent of my (untested) pseudo-code. It should work fine. Note
> that I used write_trylock() only, so there is no queueing (which also
> implies no fairness).
> 
> I'm not saying it's a _good_ idea.  I'm saying it might work if all you
> worry about is the irq-disabled part.

Right, if you make it unfair and utterly prone to starvation then yes,
you can make it 'work'.