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Michael Ellerman authored
commit 51d7d520 upstream. The kernel defines the function spin_is_locked(), which can be used to check if a spinlock is currently locked. Using spin_is_locked() on a lock you don't hold is obviously racy. That is, even though you may observe that the lock is unlocked, it may become locked at any time. There is (at least) one exception to that, which is if two locks are used as a pair, and the holder of each checks the status of the other before doing any update. Assuming *A and *B are two locks, and *COUNTER is a shared non-atomic value: The first CPU does: spin_lock(*A) if spin_is_locked(*B) # nothing else smp_mb() LOAD r = *COUNTER r++ STORE *COUNTER = r spin_unlock(*A) And the second CPU does: spin_lock(*B) if spin_is_locked(*A) # nothing else smp_mb() LOAD r = *COUNTER r++ STORE *COUNTER = r spin_unlock(*B) Although this is a strange locking construct, it should work. It seems to be understood, but not documented, that spin_is_locked() is not a memory barrier, so in the examples above and below the caller inserts its own memory barrier before acting on the result of spin_is_locked(). For now we assume spin_is_locked() is implemented as below, and we break it out in our examples: bool spin_is_locked(*LOCK) { LOAD l = *LOCK return l.locked } Our intuition is that there should be no problem even if the two code sequences run simultaneously such as: CPU 0 CPU 1 ================================================== spin_lock(*A) spin_lock(*B) LOAD b = *B LOAD a = *A if b.locked # true if a.locked # true # nothing # nothing spin_unlock(*A) spin_unlock(*B) If one CPU gets the lock before the other then it will do the update and the other CPU will back off: CPU 0 CPU 1 ================================================== spin_lock(*A) LOAD b = *B spin_lock(*B) if b.locked # false LOAD a = *A else if a.locked # true smp_mb() # nothing LOAD r1 = *COUNTER spin_unlock(*B) r1++ STORE *COUNTER = r1 spin_unlock(*A) However in reality spin_lock() itself is not indivisible. On powerpc we implement it as a load-and-reserve and store-conditional. Ignoring the retry logic for the lost reservation case, it boils down to: spin_lock(*LOCK) { LOAD l = *LOCK l.locked = true STORE *LOCK = l ACQUIRE_BARRIER } The ACQUIRE_BARRIER is required to give spin_lock() ACQUIRE semantics as defined in memory-barriers.txt: This acts as a one-way permeable barrier. It guarantees that all memory operations after the ACQUIRE operation will appear to happen after the ACQUIRE operation with respect to the other components of the system. On modern powerpc systems we use lwsync for ACQUIRE_BARRIER. lwsync is also know as "lightweight sync", or "sync 1". As described in Power ISA v2.07 section B.2.1.1, in this scenario the lwsync is not the barrier itself. It instead causes the LOAD of *LOCK to act as the barrier, preventing any loads or stores in the locked region from occurring prior to the load of *LOCK. Whether this behaviour is in accordance with the definition of ACQUIRE semantics in memory-barriers.txt is open to discussion, we may switch to a different barrier in future. What this means in practice is that the following can occur: CPU 0 CPU 1 ================================================== LOAD a = *A LOAD b = *B a.locked = true b.locked = true LOAD b = *B LOAD a = *A STORE *A = a STORE *B = b if b.locked # false if a.locked # false else else smp_mb() smp_mb() LOAD r1 = *COUNTER LOAD r2 = *COUNTER r1++ r2++ STORE *COUNTER = r1 STORE *COUNTER = r2 # Lost update spin_unlock(*A) spin_unlock(*B) That is, the load of *B can occur prior to the store that makes *A visibly locked. And similarly for CPU 1. The result is both CPUs hold their lock and believe the other lock is unlocked. The easiest fix for this is to add a full memory barrier to the start of spin_is_locked(), so adding to our previous definition would give us: bool spin_is_locked(*LOCK) { smp_mb() LOAD l = *LOCK return l.locked } The new barrier orders the store to the lock we are locking vs the load of the other lock: CPU 0 CPU 1 ================================================== LOAD a = *A LOAD b = *B a.locked = true b.locked = true STORE *A = a STORE *B = b smp_mb() smp_mb() LOAD b = *B LOAD a = *A if b.locked # true if a.locked # true # nothing # nothing spin_unlock(*A) spin_unlock(*B) Although the above example is theoretical, there is code similar to this example in sem_lock() in ipc/sem.c. This commit in addition to the next commit appears to be a fix for crashes we are seeing in that code where we believe this race happens in practice. Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au> Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
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