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Comment by compudj | Hacker News Reader

Some use-cases likely to be enhanced by rseq: statistics counters, memory allocators (jemalloc, glibc malloc, and others), user-space tracing (LTTng), user-space Read-Copy Update (liburcu), reading performance monitoring unit counters from user-space on ARM64, and possibly user-space task scheduling.

Also, just reading the current CPU number can now be done faster by reading the __rseq_abi->cpu_id field rather than calling the sched_getcpu vDSO.

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Thanks for seeing this work through, Mathieu.

> possibly user-space task scheduling

I'm very interested in this aspect. Do you have a sense of whether there's enough in the kernel now to build this, or are there still pieces missing?

Yes, there are indeed pieces missing for this use-case. I intend to push another system call for the next merge window (4.19): "cpu_opv" [1]. It stands for "CPU operation vector", which is needed to take care of moving user-level tasks around between per-cpu work-queues touched by rseq fast-paths in a way that is safe against CPU hotplug. It's also needed to migrate free memory between per-cpu memory pools modified by rseq fast-paths safely against CPU hotplug. Some of it can be approximated by setting cpu affinity, but it's racy against CPU hotplug.

cpu_opv can be used as a slow-path fallback in pretty much all scenarios where the rseq fast-path aborts.

rseq user-level APIs are pretty much limited to only work on the current CPU, whereas cpu_opv allows creating operations on per-cpu data structures [2] which take the CPU number as argument. If it happens to be on the current CPU, rseq can be used and it is fast, but if the CPU number is not the current CPU, or is an offline CPU, then cpu_opv takes care of performing the operation safely with respect to rseq critical sections, and other cpu_opv operations.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rseq/linux-r... [2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rseq/linux-r...

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