relay: Use irq_work instead of plain timer for deferred wakeup

Relay avoids calling wake_up_interruptible() for doing the wakeup of
readers/consumers, waiting for the generation of new data, from the
context of a process which produced the data.  This is apparently done to
prevent the possibility of a deadlock in case Scheduler itself is is
generating data for the relay, after acquiring rq->lock.

The following patch used a timer (to be scheduled at next jiffy), for
delegating the wakeup to another context.
	commit 7c9cb38302e78d24e37f7d8a2ea7eed4ae5f2fa7
	Author: Tom Zanussi <zanussi@comcast.net>
	Date:   Wed May 9 02:34:01 2007 -0700

	relay: use plain timer instead of delayed work

	relay doesn't need to use schedule_delayed_work() for waking readers
	when a simple timer will do.

Scheduling a plain timer, at next jiffies boundary, to do the wakeup
causes a significant wakeup latency for the Userspace client, which makes
relay less suitable for the high-frequency low-payload use cases where the
data gets generated at a very high rate, like multiple sub buffers getting
filled within a milli second.  Moreover the timer is re-scheduled on every
newly produced sub buffer so the timer keeps getting pushed out if sub
buffers are filled in a very quick succession (less than a jiffy gap
between filling of 2 sub buffers).  As a result relay runs out of sub
buffers to store the new data.

By using irq_work it is ensured that wakeup of userspace client, blocked
in the poll call, is done at earliest (through self IPI or next timer
tick) enabling it to always consume the data in time.  Also this makes
relay consistent with printk & ring buffers (trace), as they too use
irq_work for deferred wake up of readers.

[arnd@arndb.de: select CONFIG_IRQ_WORK]
 Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160912154035.3222156-1-arnd@arndb.de
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1472906487-1559-1-git-send-email-akash.goel@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Akash Goel <akash.goel@intel.com>
Cc: Tom Zanussi <tzanussi@gmail.com>
Cc: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig
index d7fc22639665..34407f15e6d3 100644
--- a/init/Kconfig
+++ b/init/Kconfig
@@ -1288,6 +1288,7 @@ config SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2
 
 config RELAY
 	bool "Kernel->user space relay support (formerly relayfs)"
+	select IRQ_WORK
 	help
 	  This option enables support for relay interface support in
 	  certain file systems (such as debugfs).