Re: [PATCH] sys_time-speedup-small-cleanup

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Oleg Nesterov wrote:
on top of sys_time-speedup.patch

Ingo Molnar wrote:
 asmlinkage long sys_time(time_t __user * tloc)
 {
-	time_t i;
-	struct timeval tv;
+	/*
+	 * We read xtime.tv_sec atomically - it's updated
+	 * atomically by update_wall_time(), so no need to
+	 * even read-lock the xtime seqlock:
+	 */
+	time_t i = xtime.tv_sec;
- do_gettimeofday(&tv);
-	i = tv.tv_sec;
+	smp_rmb(); /* sys_time() results are coherent */

Why do we need this barrier? My guess it is needed to prevent
the reading of xtime.tv_sec twice, yes? In that case a simple
barrier() should be enough.

Without the smp_rmb, you can potentially have a situation where one CPU is still reading an old value from cache while another has the new value. It's generally a rather small race window on most architectures, but very bad things can happen if time ever goes backwards, so it's worth the overhead of maintaining coherence on smp.

	-- Chris

Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>

--- t/kernel/time.c~	2007-06-26 16:28:59.000000000 +0400
+++ t/kernel/time.c	2007-06-26 16:32:09.000000000 +0400
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ asmlinkage long sys_time(time_t __user *
 	 */
 	time_t i = xtime.tv_sec;
- smp_rmb(); /* sys_time() results are coherent */
+	barrier(); /* sys_time() results are coherent */
if (tloc) {
 		if (put_user(i, tloc))

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