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rcu: add shiny new debug assists to Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt
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Add a section describing PROVE_RCU, DEBUG_OBJECTS_RCU_HEAD, and
the __rcu sparse checking to the RCU checklist.

Suggested-by: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
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Paul E. McKenney committed Aug 20, 2010
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23 changes: 23 additions & 0 deletions Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt
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Expand Up @@ -365,3 +365,26 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
and the compiler to freely reorder code into and out of RCU
read-side critical sections. It is the responsibility of the
RCU update-side primitives to deal with this.

17. Use CONFIG_PROVE_RCU, CONFIG_DEBUG_OBJECTS_RCU_HEAD, and
the __rcu sparse checks to validate your RCU code. These
can help find problems as follows:

CONFIG_PROVE_RCU: check that accesses to RCU-protected data
structures are carried out under the proper RCU
read-side critical section, while holding the right
combination of locks, or whatever other conditions
are appropriate.

CONFIG_DEBUG_OBJECTS_RCU_HEAD: check that you don't pass the
same object to call_rcu() (or friends) before an RCU
grace period has elapsed since the last time that you
passed that same object to call_rcu() (or friends).

__rcu sparse checks: tag the pointer to the RCU-protected data
structure with __rcu, and sparse will warn you if you
access that pointer without the services of one of the
variants of rcu_dereference().

These debugging aids can help you find problems that are
otherwise extremely difficult to spot.

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