Re: [KJ] [patch] fix common mistake in polling loops

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G'day

On 8/8/06, Pavel Machek <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi!

> >> Well, whoever wrote thi has some serious problems (in attitude
> >> department). *Any* loop you design may take half a minute under
> >> streange circumstances.
>
> 6.
> common mistake in polling loops [from Linus]:

Yes, Linus was wrong here. Or more precisely, he's right original code
is broken, but his suggested "fix" is worse than the original.

        unsigned long timeout = jiffies + HZ/2;
        for (;;) {
                if (ready())
                        return 0;
[IMAGINE HALF A SECOND DELAY HERE]
                if (time_after(timeout, jiffies))
                        break;
                msleep(10);
        }

Oops.

> >Actually it may be broken, depending on use. In some cases this loop
> >may want to poll the hardware 50 times, 10msec appart... and your loop
> >can poll it only once in extreme conditions.
> >
> >Actually your loop is totally broken, and may poll only once (without
> >any delay) and then directly timeout :-P -- that will break _any_
> >user.
>
> The Idea is that we are checking some event in external hardware that
> we know will complete in a given time (This time is not dependant on
> system activity but is fixed). After that time if the event has not
> happened we know something has borked.

But you have to make sure YOU CHECK READY AFTER THE TIMEOUT. Linus'
code does not do that.
                                                                Pavel


Sorry I did not realise that was your problem with the code.
Would it help if we just explicitly added a

if (ready())
       return 0;

after the loop, in the example code? so people wont miss adding
something like that in?

Darren J.
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