tree 21999adc54be1d32b759e1252f337ef30cc344cc
parent ad910e36da4ca3a1bd436989f632d062dda0c921
author Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1575749668 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1575749668 -0800

pipe: fix and clarify pipe write wakeup logic

The pipe rework ends up having been extra painful, partly becaused of
actual bugs with ordering and caching of the pipe state, but also
because of subtle performance issues.

In particular, the pipe rework caused the kernel build to inexplicably
slow down.

The reason turns out to be that the GNU make jobserver (which limits the
parallelism of the build) uses a pipe to implement a "token" system: a
parallel submake will read a character from the pipe to get the job
token before starting a new job, and will write a character back to the
pipe when it is done.  The overall job limit is thus easily controlled
by just writing the appropriate number of initial token characters into
the pipe.

But to work well, that really means that the old behavior of write
wakeups being synchronous (WF_SYNC) is very important - when the pipe
writer wakes up a reader, we want the reader to actually get scheduled
immediately.  Otherwise you lose the parallelism of the build.

The pipe rework lost that synchronous wakeup on write, and we had
clearly all forgotten the reasons and rules for it.

This rewrites the pipe write wakeup logic to do the required Wsync
wakeups, but also clarifies the logic and avoids extraneous wakeups.

It also ends up addign a number of comments about what oit does and why,
so that we hopefully don't end up forgetting about this next time we
change this code.

Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>