[Devel] Re: [PATCH] ia64 sn xpc: Convert to use kthread API.

[Dean Nelson]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 10:22:30AM -0500, Dean Nelson wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 02:33:32PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Dean Nelson <dcn at sgi.com> writes:
> > 
> > > Taking it one step further, if you added the notion of a thread pool,
> > > where upon exit, a thread isn't destroyed but rather is queued ready to
> > > handle the next kthread_create_quick() request.
> > 
> > That might happen.  So far I am avoiding the notion of a thread pool for
> > as long as I can.  There is some sense in it, especially in generalizing
> > the svc thread pool code from nfs.  But if I don't have to go there I would
> > prefer it.
> 
> This means that XPC will have to retain its thread pool, but I can
> understand you not wanting to go there.

On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 01:11:15PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> Ok.    Because of the module unloading issue, and because we don't have
> a lot of these threads running around, the current plan is to fix
> thread_create and kthread_stop so that they must always be paired,
> and so that kthread_stop will work correctly if the task has already
> exited.
>
> Basically that just involves calling get_task_struct in kthread_create
> and put_task_struct in kthread_stop.

Okay, so I need to expand upon Christoph Hellwig's patch so that all
the kthread_create()'d threads are kthread_stop()'d.

This is easy to do for the XPC thread that exists for the lifetime of XPC,
as well as for the threads created to manage the SGI system partitions.

XPC has the one discovery thread that is created when XPC is first started
and exits as soon as it has finished discovering all existing SGI system
partitions. With your forthcoming change to kthread_stop() that will allow
it to be called after the thread has exited, doing this one is also easy.
Note that the kthread_stop() for this discovery thread won't occur until
XPC is rmmod'd. This means that its task_struct will not be freed for
possibly a very long time (i.e., weeks). Is that a problem?

But then we come to XPC's pool of threads that deliver channel messages
to the appropriate consumer (like XPNET) and can block indefinitely. As
mentioned earlier there could be hundreds if not thousands of these
(our systems keep getting bigger). So now requiring a kthread_stop()
for each one of these becomes more of a problem, as it is a lot of
task_struct pointers to maintain.

Currently, XPC maintains these threads via a
wait_event_interruptible_exclusive() queue so that it can wakeup as many
or as few as needed at any given moment by calling wake_up_nr(). When XPC
is rmmod'd, a flag is set which causes them to exit and wake_up_all()
is called.  Therefore XPC dosen't need to remember their pids or
task_struct pointers.

So what would you suggest we do for this pool of threads?

Is there any way to have a version of kthread_create() that doesn't
require a matching kthread_stop()? Or add a kthread_not_stopping()
that does the put_task_struct() call, so as to eliminate the need for
calling kthread_stop()?  Or should we reconsider the kthread pool approach
(and get XPC out of the thread management business altogether)? Robin
Holt is putting together a proposal for how one could do a kthread pool,
it should provide a bit more justification for going down that road.

Thanks,
Dean

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