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sched/wait: Document waitqueue_active()
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Kosuku reports that there were a fair number of buggy
waitqueue_active() users and this function deserves a big comment in
order to avoid growing more.

Reported-by: Kosuke Tatsukawa <tatsu@ab.jp.nec.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
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Peter Zijlstra authored and Ingo Molnar committed Nov 23, 2015
1 parent 38c6ade commit 69e51e9
Showing 1 changed file with 30 additions and 0 deletions.
30 changes: 30 additions & 0 deletions include/linux/wait.h
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -102,6 +102,36 @@ init_waitqueue_func_entry(wait_queue_t *q, wait_queue_func_t func)
q->func = func;
}

/**
* waitqueue_active -- locklessly test for waiters on the queue
* @q: the waitqueue to test for waiters
*
* returns true if the wait list is not empty
*
* NOTE: this function is lockless and requires care, incorrect usage _will_
* lead to sporadic and non-obvious failure.
*
* Use either while holding wait_queue_head_t::lock or when used for wakeups
* with an extra smp_mb() like:
*
* CPU0 - waker CPU1 - waiter
*
* for (;;) {
* @cond = true; prepare_to_wait(&wq, &wait, state);
* smp_mb(); // smp_mb() from set_current_state()
* if (waitqueue_active(wq)) if (@cond)
* wake_up(wq); break;
* schedule();
* }
* finish_wait(&wq, &wait);
*
* Because without the explicit smp_mb() it's possible for the
* waitqueue_active() load to get hoisted over the @cond store such that we'll
* observe an empty wait list while the waiter might not observe @cond.
*
* Also note that this 'optimization' trades a spin_lock() for an smp_mb(),
* which (when the lock is uncontended) are of roughly equal cost.
*/
static inline int waitqueue_active(wait_queue_head_t *q)
{
return !list_empty(&q->task_list);
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