Re: [PATCH] tools/memory-model: document the "one-time init" pattern

["Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 04:28:27PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 11:17:46AM -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> > Given a type "T", an object x of type pointer-to-T, and a function
> > "func" that takes various arguments and returns a pointer-to-T, the
> > accepted API for calling func once would be to create once_func() as
> > follows:
> > 
> > T *once_func(T **ppt, args...)
> > {
> > 	static DEFINE_MUTEX(mut);
> > 	T *p;
> > 
> > 	p = smp_load_acquire(ppt);	/* Mild optimization */
> > 	if (p)
> > 		return p;
> > 
> > 	mutex_lock(mut);
> > 	p = smp_load_acquire(ppt);
> > 	if (!p) {
> > 		p = func(args...);
> > 		if (!IS_ERR_OR_NULL(p))
> > 			smp_store_release(ppt, p);
> > 	}
> > 	mutex_unlock(mut);
> > 	return p;
> > }
> > 
> > Users then would have to call once_func(&x, args...) and check the
> > result.  Different x objects would constitute different "once"
> > domains.
> [...]
> > In fact, the only drawback I can think of is that because this relies
> > on a single mutex for all the different possible x's, it might lead to
> > locking conflicts (if func had to call once_func() recursively, for
> > example).  In most reasonable situations such conflicts would not
> > arise.
> 
> Another drawback for this approach relative to my get_foo() approach
> upthread is that, because we don't have compiler support, there's no
> enforcement that accesses to 'x' go through once_func().  My approach
> wraps accesses in a deliberately-opaque struct so you have to write
> some really ugly code to get at the raw value, and it's just easier to
> call get_foo().

Could ACCESS_PRIVATE() help in this case?  This relies on sparse rather
than the compiler, but some of the testing services do run sparse
regularly.

							Thanx, Paul