[Lustre-devel] The good usage of lustre *_thread_info structure

[Nikita Danilov]

On Mar 26, 2011, at 01:27 , Aurélien Degrémont wrote:

> Hello

Hello Aurélien,

> 
> Doing some coding in Lustre, I'm wondering for a while was it the 
> correct usage of thread_info structure like mdt_thread_info or 
> mdd_thread_info.
> They contain pre-allocated data or pointer to pass this between function 
> call and layer without overloading the stack.
> My concern is: if a function decide to use of them to store some of its 
> data, how can it be sure that it was not used by an upper layer or a 
> calling function?
> How can I be sure it is safe to use them?

the answer is: by trusting everybody to follow the convention. In the meta-data stack each "method" takes a pointer to struct lu_env is a parameter. This environment contains two "contexts" (struct lu_ctx): lu_env::le_ctx and lu_env::le_ses.

By convention, lu_env::le_ctx should be used only as a substitute for an automatic variables, that is, it is used to conserve a space on the stack (which is a rather limited resource in kernel space) and should never me used to pass information between functions. lu_env::le_ses is a context embedded into a request, which can  be used to store some request-global information, like credentials.

For the call chains within a layer it is up to the programmer to ascertain that the same element of lu_env::le_ctx is not re-used improperly. To some extent this can be done automatically, e.g., by introducing an interface to access sub-structures in struct mdt_thread_info, which would maintain a "busy" flag and check it on access. 

Hope this helps,
Nikita.

> 
> By example :
> 
> struct mdt_thread_info {
>    ...
>         /*
>          * Object attributes.
>          */
>         struct md_attr             mti_attr;
>     ...
> }
> 
> A function in MDT layer could decide it will use this structure 
> (mti_attr) for its own need, then it will call several functions that 
> could have the same need. How can those functions know that they can or 
> cannot re-use this structure? Same issues for pointers.
> 
> Thanks for any help
> 
> Aurélien
> 
> 
> 
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