The only generic interface to execute asynchronously in the BH context is
tasklet; however, it's marked deprecated and has some design flaws such as
the execution code accessing the tasklet item after the execution is
complete which can lead to subtle use-after-free in certain usage scenarios
and less-developed flush and cancel mechanisms.
This patch implements BH workqueues which share the same semantics and
features of regular workqueues but execute their work items in the softirq
context. As there is always only one BH execution context per CPU, none of
the concurrency management mechanisms applies and a BH workqueue can be
thought of as a convenience wrapper around softirq.
Except for the inability to sleep while executing and lack of max_active
adjustments, BH workqueues and work items should behave the same as regular
workqueues and work items.
Currently, the execution is hooked to tasklet[_hi]. However, the goal is to
convert all tasklet users over to BH workqueues. Once the conversion is
complete, tasklet can be removed and BH workqueues can directly take over
the tasklet softirqs.
system_bh[_highpri]_wq are added. As queue-wide flushing doesn't exist in
tasklet, all existing tasklet users should be able to use the system BH
workqueues without creating their own workqueues.
v3: - Add missing interrupt.h include.
v2: - Instead of using tasklets, hook directly into its softirq action
functions - tasklet[_hi]_action(). This is slightly cheaper and closer
to the eventual code structure we want to arrive at. Suggested by Lai.
- Lai also pointed out several places which need NULL worker->task
handling or can use clarification. Updated.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=wjDW53w4-YcSmgKC5RruiRLHmJ1sXeYdp_ZgVoBw=5byA@mail.gmail.com
Tested-by: Allen Pais <allen.lkml@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Lai Jiangshan <jiangshanlai@gmail.com>