s of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp() will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock. If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity. 6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible for invocation. If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy, we will still be in the single critical section. In this case, the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state. On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period. On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp(). The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick per CPU to once per grace period. This was reverted do to hangs found during testing by Yinghai Lu and Ingo Molnar. Frederic Weisbecker supplied Yinghai with tracing that located the underlying problem, and Frederic also provided the fix. The underlying problem was that the HARDIRQ_ENTER() macro from lib/locking-selftest.c invoked irq_enter(), which in turn invokes rcu_irq_enter(), but HARDIRQ_EXIT() invoked __irq_exit(), which does not invoke rcu_irq_exit(). This situation resulted in calls to rcu_irq_enter() that were not balanced by the required calls to rcu_irq_exit(). Therefore, after these locking selftests completed, RCU's dyntick-idle nesting count was a large number (for example, 72), which caused RCU to to conclude that the affected CPU was not in dyntick-idle mode when in fact it was. RCU would therefore incorrectly wait for this dyntick-idle CPU, resulting in hangs. In contrast, with Frederic's patch, which replaces the irq_enter() in HARDIRQ_ENTER() with an __irq_enter(), these tests don't ever call either rcu_irq_enter() or rcu_irq_exit(), which works because the CPU running the test is already marked as not being in dyntick-idle mode. This means that the rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() calls and RCU then has no problem working out which CPUs are in dyntick-idle mode and which are not. The reason that the imbalance was not noticed before the barrier patch was applied is that the old implementation of rcu_enter_nohz() ignored the nesting depth. This could still result in delays, but much shorter ones. Whenever there was a delay, RCU would IPI the CPU with the unbalanced nesting level, which would eventually result in rcu_enter_nohz() being called, which in turn would force RCU to see that the CPU was in dyntick-idle mode. The reason that very few people noticed the problem is that the mismatched irq_enter() vs. __irq_exit() occured only when the kernel was built with CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCKING_API_SELFTESTS. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett ¸>(