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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>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.