The entries counter in cpu buffer is not atomic. It can be updated by
other interrupts or from another CPU (readers).
But making entries into "atomic_t" causes an atomic operation that can
hurt performance. Instead we convert it to a local_t that will increment
a counter with a local CPU atomic operation (if the arch supports it).
Instead of fighting with readers and overwrites that decrement the counter,
I added a "read" counter. Every time a reader reads an entry it is
incremented.
We already have a overrun counter and with that, the entries counter and
the read counter, we can calculate the total number of entries in the
buffer with:
(entries - overrun) - read
As long as the total number of entries in the ring buffer is less than
the word size, this will work. But since the entries counter was previously
a long, this is no different than what we had before.
Thanks to Andrew Morton for pointing out in the first version that
atomic_t does not replace unsigned long. I switched to atomic_long_t
even though it is signed. A negative count is most likely a bug.
[ Impact: keep accurate count of cpu buffer entries ]
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
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