documentation: Document call_rcu() safety mechanisms and limitations

The call_rcu() family of primitives will take action to accelerate
grace periods when the number of callbacks pending on a given CPU
becomes excessive.  Although this safety mechanism can be useful,
it is no substitute for users of call_rcu() having rate-limit controls
in place.  This commit adds this nuance to the documentation.

Reported-by: "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt b/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt
index 91266193b8f4..9d10d1db16a5 100644
--- a/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RCU/checklist.txt
@@ -256,10 +256,10 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
                 variations on this theme.
 
         b.      Limiting update rate.  For example, if updates occur only
-                once per hour, then no explicit rate limiting is required,
-                unless your system is already badly broken.  The dcache
-                subsystem takes this approach -- updates are guarded
-                by a global lock, limiting their rate.
+                once per hour, then no explicit rate limiting is
+                required, unless your system is already badly broken.
+                Older versions of the dcache subsystem take this approach,
+                guarding updates with a global lock, limiting their rate.
 
         c.      Trusted update -- if updates can only be done manually by
                 superuser or some other trusted user, then it might not
@@ -268,7 +268,8 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
                 the machine.
 
         d.      Use call_rcu_bh() rather than call_rcu(), in order to take
-                advantage of call_rcu_bh()'s faster grace periods.
+                advantage of call_rcu_bh()'s faster grace periods.  (This
+                is only a partial solution, though.)
 
         e.      Periodically invoke synchronize_rcu(), permitting a limited
                 number of updates per grace period.
@@ -276,6 +277,13 @@ over a rather long period of time, but improvements are always welcome!
         The same cautions apply to call_rcu_bh(), call_rcu_sched(),
         call_srcu(), and kfree_rcu().
 
+        Note that although these primitives do take action to avoid memory
+        exhaustion when any given CPU has too many callbacks, a determined
+        user could still exhaust memory.  This is especially the case
+        if a system with a large number of CPUs has been configured to
+        offload all of its RCU callbacks onto a single CPU, or if the
+        system has relatively little free memory.
+
 9.      All RCU list-traversal primitives, which include
         rcu_dereference(), list_for_each_entry_rcu(), and
         list_for_each_safe_rcu(), must be either within an RCU read-side