On Fri, 12 Sep 2014, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > So, I am not seeing this failure in my testing, but my best guess is > that the problem is due to the fact that force_quiescent_state() is > sometimes invoked with preemption enabled, which breaks __this_cpu_read() > though perhaps with very low probability. The common-case call (from > __call_rcu_core()) -does- have preemption disabled, in fact, it has > interrupts disabled. How could __this_cpu_read() break in a way that would make a difference to the code? There was no disabling/enabling of preemption before the patch and there is nothing like that after the patch. If there was a race then it still exists. The modification certainly cannot create a race.