workqueue: mark a work item being canceled as such

There can be two reasons try_to_grab_pending() can fail with -EAGAIN.
One is when someone else is queueing or deqeueing the work item.  With
the previous patches, it is guaranteed that PENDING and queued state
will soon agree making it safe to busy-retry in this case.

The other is if multiple __cancel_work_timer() invocations are racing
one another.  __cancel_work_timer() grabs PENDING and then waits for
running instances of the target work item on all CPUs while holding
PENDING and !queued.  try_to_grab_pending() invoked from another task
will keep returning -EAGAIN while the current owner is waiting.

Not distinguishing the two cases is okay because __cancel_work_timer()
is the only user of try_to_grab_pending() and it invokes
wait_on_work() whenever grabbing fails.  For the first case, busy
looping should be fine but wait_on_work() doesn't cause any critical
problem.  For the latter case, the new contender usually waits for the
same condition as the current owner, so no unnecessarily extended
busy-looping happens.  Combined, these make __cancel_work_timer()
technically correct even without irq protection while grabbing PENDING
or distinguishing the two different cases.

While the current code is technically correct, not distinguishing the
two cases makes it difficult to use try_to_grab_pending() for other
purposes than canceling because it's impossible to tell whether it's
safe to busy-retry grabbing.

This patch adds a mechanism to mark a work item being canceled.
try_to_grab_pending() now disables irq on success and returns -EAGAIN
to indicate that grabbing failed but PENDING and queued states are
gonna agree soon and it's safe to busy-loop.  It returns -ENOENT if
the work item is being canceled and it may stay PENDING && !queued for
arbitrary amount of time.

__cancel_work_timer() is modified to mark the work canceling with
WORK_OFFQ_CANCELING after grabbing PENDING, thus making
try_to_grab_pending() fail with -ENOENT instead of -EAGAIN.  Also, it
invokes wait_on_work() iff grabbing failed with -ENOENT.  This isn't
necessary for correctness but makes it consistent with other future
users of try_to_grab_pending().

v2: try_to_grab_pending() was testing preempt_count() to ensure that
    the caller has disabled preemption.  This triggers spuriously if
    !CONFIG_PREEMPT_COUNT.  Use preemptible() instead.  Reported by
    Fengguang Wu.

v3: Updated so that try_to_grab_pending() disables irq on success
    rather than requiring preemption disabled by the caller.  This
    makes busy-looping easier and will allow try_to_grap_pending() to
    be used from bh/irq contexts.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/workqueue.h b/include/linux/workqueue.h
index f562674db404..5f4aeaa9f3e6 100644
--- a/include/linux/workqueue.h
+++ b/include/linux/workqueue.h
@@ -70,7 +70,10 @@ enum {
 
 	/* data contains off-queue information when !WORK_STRUCT_CWQ */
 	WORK_OFFQ_FLAG_BASE	= WORK_STRUCT_FLAG_BITS,
-	WORK_OFFQ_FLAG_BITS	= 0,
+
+	WORK_OFFQ_CANCELING	= (1 << WORK_OFFQ_FLAG_BASE),
+
+	WORK_OFFQ_FLAG_BITS	= 1,
 	WORK_OFFQ_CPU_SHIFT	= WORK_OFFQ_FLAG_BASE + WORK_OFFQ_FLAG_BITS,
 
 	/* convenience constants */