[GIT, RFC] Killing the Big Kernel Lock

* [GIT, RFC] Killing the Big Kernel Lock
@ 2010-03-24 21:40 Arnd Bergmann
  2010-03-24 21:07 ` Andrew Morton
                   ` (10 more replies)
  0 siblings, 11 replies; 49+ messages in thread
From: Arnd Bergmann @ 2010-03-24 21:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Frederic Weisbecker
  Cc: linux-kernel, Matthew Wilcox, Thomas Gleixner, jblunck, Alan Cox,
	Ingo Molnar

I've spent some time continuing the work of the people on Cc and many others
to remove the big kernel lock from Linux and I now have bkl-removal branch
in my git tree at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/arnd/playground.git
that lets me run a kernel on my quad-core machine with the only users of the BKL
being mostly obscure device driver modules.

The oldest patch in this series is roughly eight years old and is Willy's patch
to remove the BKL from fs/locks.c, and I took a series of patches from Jan that
removes it from most of the VFS.

The other non-obvious changes are:

- all file operations that either have an .ioctl method or do not have their
  own .llseek method used to implicitly require the BKL. I've changed that
  so they need to explicitly set .llseek = default_llseek, .unlocked_ioctl =
  default_ioctl, and changed all the code that either has supplied a .ioctl
  method or looks like it needs the BKL somewhere else, meaning the
  default_llseek function might actually do something.

- The block layer now has a global bkldev_mutex that is used in all block
  drivers in place of the BKL. The only recursive instance of the BKL was
  __blkdev_get(), which is now called with the blkdev_mutex held instead of
  grabbing the BKL. This has some possible performance implications that
  need to be looked into.

- The init/main.c code no longer take the BKL. I figured that this was
  completely unnecessary because there is no other code running at the
  same time that takes the BKL.

- The most invasive change is in the TTY layer, which has a new global
  mutex (sorry!). I know that Alan has plans of his own to remove the BKL
  from this subsystem, so my patches may not go anywhere, but they seem
  to work fine for me.
  I've called the new lock the 'Big TTY Mutex' (BTM), a name that probably
  makes more sense if you happen to speak German.
  The basic idea here is to make recursive locking and the release-on-sleep
  explicit, so every mutex_lock, wait_event, workqueue_flush and schedule
  in the TTY layer now explicitly releases the BTM before blocking.

- All drivers that still require the BKL are now listed as 'depends on BKL'
  in Kconfig, and you can set that symbol to 'y', 'm' or 'n'. If the lock
  itself is a module, only other modules can use it, and /proc/modules
  will tell you exactly which ones those are. I've thought about adding
  a module_init function in that module that will taint the kernel, but so
  far I haven't done that.

- Included is a debugfs file that gives statistics over the BKL usage from
  early boot on. This is now obsolete and will not get merged, but I'm
  including it for reference.

Frederic has volunteered to help merging all of this upstream, which I
very much welcome. The shape that the tree is in now is very inconsistent,
especially some of the bits at the end are a bit dodgy and all of it needs
more testing.

I've built-tested an allmodconfig kernel with CONFIG_BKL disabled
on x86_64, i386, powerpc64, powerpc32, s390 and arm to make sure I
catch all the modules that depend on BKL, and I've been running
various versions of this tree on my desktop machine over the last few
weeks while adding stuff.

	Arnd

---

Arnd Bergmann (44):
      input: kill BKL, fix input_open_file locking
      ptrace: kill BKL
      procfs: kill BKL in llseek
      random: forbid llseek on random chardev
      x86/microcode: use nonseekable_open
      perf_event: use nonseekable_open
      dm: use nonseekable_open
      vgaarb: use nonseekable_open
      kvm: don't require BKL
      nvram: kill BKL
      do_coredump: do not take BKL
      hpet: kill BKL, add compat_ioctl
      proc/pci: kill BKL
      autofs/autofs4: move compat_ioctl handling into fs
      usb/mon: kill BKL usage
      fat: push down BKL
      sunrpc: push down BKL
      pcmcia: push down BKL
      vfs: kill BKL in default_llseek
      BKL: introduce CONFIG_BKL.
      bkl-removal: make fops->ioctl and default_llseek optional
      x86: update defconfig to CONFIG_BKL=m
      bkl removal: make unlocked_ioctl mandatory
      bkl removal: use default_llseek in code that uses the BKL
      BKL removal: mark remaining users as 'depends on BKL'
      tty: replace BKL with a new tty_lock
      tty: make atomic_write_lock release tty_lock
      tty: make tty_port->mutex nest under tty_lock
      tty: make termios mutex nest under tty_lock
      tty: make ldisc_mutex nest under tty_lock
      tty: never hold tty_lock() while getting tty_mutex
      ppp: use big tty mutex
      tty: release tty lock when blocking
      tty: implement BTM as mutex instead of BKL
      briq_panel: do not use BTM
      affs: remove leftover unlock_kernel
      kvm: don't require BKL
      block: replace BKL with global mutex
      init: kill BKL usage
      debug: instrument big kernel lock
      BKL removal: make the BKL modular

Matthew Wilcox (1):
      [RFC] Remove BKL from fs/locks.c

Jan Blunck (19):
      JFS: Free sbi memory in error path
      BKL: Explicitly add BKL around get_sb/fill_super
      BKL: Remove outdated comment and include
      BKL: Remove BKL from Amiga FFS
      BKL: Remove BKL from BFS
      BKL: Remove BKL from CifsFS
      BKL: Remove BKL from ext3 fill_super()
      BKL: Remove BKL from ext3_put_super() and ext3_remount()
      BKL: Remove BKL from ext4 filesystem
      BKL: Remove smp_lock.h from exofs
      BKL: Remove BKL from HFS
      BKL: Remove BKL from HFS+
      BKL: Remove BKL from JFS
      BKL: Remove BKL from NILFS2
      BKL: Remove BKL from NTFS
      BKL: Remove BKL from cgroup
      BKL: Remove BKL from do_new_mount()
      ext2: Add ext2_sb_info s_lock spinlock
      BKL: Remove BKL from ext2 filesystem

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