seqlock: add 'raw_seqcount_begin()' function

The normal read_seqcount_begin() function will wait for any current
writers to exit their critical region by looping until the sequence
count is even.

That "wait for sequence count to stabilize" is the right thing to do if
the read-locker will just retry the whole operation on contention: no
point in doing a potentially expensive reader sequence if we know at the
beginning that we'll just end up re-doing it all.

HOWEVER.  Some users don't actually retry the operation, but instead
will abort and do the operation with proper locking.  So the sequence
count case may be the optimistic quick case, but in the presense of
writers you may want to do full locking in order to guarantee forward
progress.  The prime example of this would be the RCU name lookup.

And in that case, you may well be better off without the "retry early",
and are in a rush to instead get to the failure handling.  Thus this
"raw" interface that just returns the sequence number without testing it
- it just forces the low bit to zero so that read_seqcount_retry() will
always fail such a "active concurrent writer" scenario.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 21 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/seqlock.h b/include/linux/seqlock.h
index bb1fac5..600060e2 100644
--- a/include/linux/seqlock.h
+++ b/include/linux/seqlock.h
@@ -166,6 +166,27 @@ static inline unsigned read_seqcount_begin(const seqcount_t *s)
 }
 
 /**
+ * raw_seqcount_begin - begin a seq-read critical section
+ * @s: pointer to seqcount_t
+ * Returns: count to be passed to read_seqcount_retry
+ *
+ * raw_seqcount_begin opens a read critical section of the given seqcount.
+ * Validity of the critical section is tested by checking read_seqcount_retry
+ * function.
+ *
+ * Unlike read_seqcount_begin(), this function will not wait for the count
+ * to stabilize. If a writer is active when we begin, we will fail the
+ * read_seqcount_retry() instead of stabilizing at the beginning of the
+ * critical section.
+ */
+static inline unsigned raw_seqcount_begin(const seqcount_t *s)
+{
+	unsigned ret = ACCESS_ONCE(s->sequence);
+	smp_rmb();
+	return ret & ~1;
+}
+
+/**
  * __read_seqcount_retry - end a seq-read critical section (without barrier)
  * @s: pointer to seqcount_t
  * @start: count, from read_seqcount_begin