[BUG] 2.6.37-rc3 massive interactivity regression on ARM

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, 2010-12-10 at 12:39 -0600, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2010, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> 
> > > Yeah, but that kinda defeats the purpose of having it implemented in
> > > seqlock.h. Ideally we'd teach gcc about these long pointers and have
> > > something like:
> > >
> > >   write_seqcount_begin(&this_cpu_read(irq_time_seq));
> > >
> > > do the right thing.
> >
> > gcc wont be able to do this yet (%fs/%gs selectors)
> 
> The kernel can do that using the __percpu annotation.

That's not true:

# define __percpu

Its a complete NOP.

> > But we can provide this_cpu_write_seqcount_{begin|end}()
> 
> No we cannot do hat. this_cpu ops are for per cpu data and not for locking
> values shared between processors. We have a mechanism for passing per cpu
> pointers with a corresponding annotation.

-enoparse, its not locking anything, is a per-cpu sequence count.