> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:31:31PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 13:53 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 03:03:13PM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > > Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I was indeed thinking in terms of the free from RCU being specially marked.
> > > >
> > > > Isnt there some way to shorten the rcu periods significantly? Critical
> > > > sections do not take that long after all.
> > >
> > > In theory, yes. However, the shorter the grace period, the greater the
> > > per-update overhead of grace-period detection -- the general approach
> > > is to use a per-CPU high-resolution timer to force RCU grace period
> > > processing every 100 microseconds or so.
> >
> > You could of course also drive the rcu state machine from
> > rcu_read_unlock().
>
> True, and Jim Houston implemented something similar to this some years
> back:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109387402400673&w=2
>
> This of course greatly increases rcu_read_unlock() overhead. But
> perhaps it is a good implementation for the workloads that Christoph is
> thinking of.
>
> > > Also, by definition, the RCU
> > > grace period can be no shorter than the longest active RCU read-side
> > > critical section. Nevertheless, I have designed my current hierarchical
> > > RCU patch with expedited grace periods in mind, though more for the
> > > purpose of reducing latency of long strings of operations that involve
> > > synchronize_rcu() than for cache locality.
> >
> > Another thing that could be done is more often force a grace period by
> > flipping the counters.
>
> Yep. That is exactly what I was getting at with the high-resolution
> timer point above. This seems to be a reasonable compromise, as it
> allows someone to specify how quickly the grace periods happen
> dynamically.
>
> But I am not sure that this gets the grace periods to go fast enough to
> cover Christoph's use case -- he seems to be in a "faster is better"
> space rather than in an "at least this fast" space. Still, it would
> likely help in some important cases.
