rcu: Complain if blocking in preemptible RCU read-side critical section

Although preemptible RCU allows its read-side critical sections to be
preempted, general blocking is forbidden.  The reason for this is that
excessive preemption times can be handled by CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y, but a
voluntarily blocked task doesn't care how high you boost its priority.
Because preemptible RCU is a global mechanism, one ill-behaved reader
hurts everyone.  Hence the prohibition against general blocking in
RCU-preempt read-side critical sections.  Preemption yes, blocking no.

This commit enforces this prohibition.

There is a special exception for the -rt patchset (which they kindly
volunteered to implement):  It is OK to block (as opposed to merely being
preempted) within an RCU-preempt read-side critical section, but only if
the blocking is subject to priority inheritance.  This exception permits
CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y to get -rt RCU readers out of trouble.

Why doesn't this exception also apply to mainline's rt_mutex?  Because
of the possibility that someone does general blocking while holding
an rt_mutex.  Yes, the priority boosting will affect the rt_mutex,
but it won't help with the task doing general blocking while holding
that rt_mutex.

Reported-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/rcu/tree.h b/kernel/rcu/tree.h
index ba38262c3554..0fa7aee9ef55 100644
--- a/kernel/rcu/tree.h
+++ b/kernel/rcu/tree.h
@@ -477,7 +477,7 @@ DECLARE_PER_CPU(char, rcu_cpu_has_work);
 
 /* Forward declarations for rcutree_plugin.h */
 static void rcu_bootup_announce(void);
-static void rcu_preempt_note_context_switch(void);
+static void rcu_preempt_note_context_switch(bool preempt);
 static int rcu_preempt_blocked_readers_cgp(struct rcu_node *rnp);
 #ifdef CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU
 static bool rcu_preempt_has_tasks(struct rcu_node *rnp);