linux-kernel - Re: [patch] mm: fix anon

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Date:	Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:25:26 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>
cc:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: [patch] mm: fix anon_vma races

On Sat, 18 Oct 2008, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> 
> But they're doing it to make the page's ptes accessible to
> memory reclaim, and the CPU doing memory reclaim will not
> (unless by coincidence) have done that anon_vma_prepare() -
> it's just reading the links which the faulters are providing.

Ahh. Good point. Then yes, those ones would really need the 
smp_read_barrier_depends() too.

Very annoying.

Of course, we _could_ just admit that the situation is really *really* 
unlikely, and there are probably something like five people running 
Linux/alpha, and that we don't care enough. With just the smp_wmb(), we 
cover all non-alpha people, since this is all through a pointer, so all 
the readers will inevitably be of the smp_read_barrier_depends kind.

If we want to guarantee the proper smp_read_barrier_depends() behaviour, 
then we'd need to find them all. Possibly by renaming the whole field 
(prepend an underscore like we usually do) and forcing all readers to use 
some "get_anon_vma(vma)" helper function, aka

  static inline struct anon_vma *get_anon_vma(struct vm_area_struct *vma)
  {
	struct anon_vma *anon_vma = vma->_anon_vma;
	smp_read_barrier_depends();
	return anon_vma;
  }

which would find them all.

Ugh. I really would have preferred not having something like that. 
Especially considering how limited that issue really is. Hmm. 

		Linus
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