PER-CPU data

[Rajasekhar Pulluru]

Hi Srivatsa,

Thanks for the response. I have used per-CPU vars and I know about how
to creating/using per-CPU vars: DECLARE_PER_CPU(type, name) for
creating per-cpu at compile time and use alloc_percpu(type) for
creating them dynamically.

I intended to ask how they are stored internally (.percpu section) and
its protection mechanism if it has any.

Thanks & Regards,
Rajasekhar


On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:24 PM, Srivatsa S. Bhat
<srivatsa.bhat at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> On 03/30/2012 12:05 PM, Dave Hylands wrote:
>
>> Hi Rajasekhar,
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Rajasekhar Pulluru
>> <pullururajasekhar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I would like to know how per-cpu data are stored internally?
>>> And how are they protected from other cores?
>>
>
>
> To put it in very simplistic terms, per-cpu data is nothing but having
> NR_CPUS copies of the data, like an array, something like:
>
> int data[NR_CPUS];
>
> And accessing this per-cpu data will essentially boil down to finding
> out the id of the processor you are running on, and indexing this array
> using that, something like:
>
> int val, cpu;
>
> cpu = smp_processor_id();
> val = data[cpu];
>
> So you automatically read/write the copy that belongs to your processor.
> That's it. However, this is an over-simplified view of per-cpu data,
> but you get the general idea...
>
>> I believe that they're just kmalloc'd like other kernel data. At the
>> kernel level there is no protection, just like all the rest of the
>> memory accessible to the kernel.
>> http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v3.3/include/asm-generic/percpu.h#L8
>> http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v3.3/mm/percpu.c
>>
>> When you declare a per-cpu variable, it goes into a special section,
>> and what you're really doing is figuring out the offset within a
>> per_cpu region of memory.
>>
>
>
> Regards,
> Srivatsa S. Bhat
>