linux-kernel - Re: [patch 00/13] sched/treewide: Clean up various racy task affinity issues

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Date:   Thu, 13 Apr 2017 11:02:11 +0200
From:   Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Cc:     LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Sebastian Siewior <bigeasy@...utronix.de>,
        Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Fenghua Yu <fenghua.yu@...el.com>,
        Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>,
        Lai Jiangshan <jiangshanlai@...il.com>,
        Len Brown <lenb@...nel.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@...ysocki.net>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
        Tony Luck <tony.luck@...el.com>,
        Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@...aro.org>
Subject: Re: [patch 00/13] sched/treewide: Clean up various racy task
 affinity issues

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 10:07:26PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> While dealing with the fallout of the scheduler cleanups on RT, we found
> several racy usage sites of the following scheme:
> 
> 	cpumask_copy(&save_cpus_allowed, &current->cpus_allowed);
> 	set_cpus_allowed_ptr(current, cpumask_of(cpu));
> 	do_stuff();
> 	set_cpus_allowed_ptr(current, &save_cpus_allowed);
> 
> That's racy in two aspects:
> 
> 1) Nothing prevents the CPU from being unplugged after the temporary
>    affinity setting is in place. This results on code being executed on the
>    wrong CPU(s).
> 
> 2) Nothing prevents a concurrent affinity setting from user space. That
>    also results in code being executed on the wrong CPU(s) and the restore
>    of the previous affinity setting overwrites the new one.
> 
> Various variants of cleanups:
> 
>  - Removal, because the calling thread is already guaranteed to run on the
>    correct CPU.
> 
>  - Conversion to smp function calls (simple register read/write)
> 
>  - Conversion to work_on_cpu(). There were even files containing comments
>    to that effect.
> 
>  - The rest needs seperate hotplug protection for work_on_cpu(). To avoid open
>    coding the
> 
> 	get_online_cpus();
> 	if (cpu_online(cpu))
> 		ret = do_stuff();
> 	else
> 		ret = -ENODEV;
> 	put_online_cpus();
> 
>    scheme this series provides a new helper function work_on_cpu_safe()
>    which implements the above.
> 
> Aside of fixing these races this allows to restrict the access to
> current->cpus_allowed with a follow up series.

Looks good, thanks for tackling these!