2.6.31-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let us know. ------------------ From: Yang Xiaowei commit 2496afbf1e50c70f80992656bcb730c8583ddac3 upstream. We need to have a stronger barrier between releasing the lock and checking for any waiting spinners. A compiler barrier is not sufficient because the CPU's ordering rules do not prevent the read xl->spinners from happening before the unlock assignment, as they are different memory locations. We need to have an explicit barrier to enforce the write-read ordering to different memory locations. Because of it, I can't bring up > 4 HVM guests on one SMP machine. [ Code and commit comments expanded -J ] [ Impact: avoid deadlock when using Xen PV spinlocks ] Signed-off-by: Yang Xiaowei Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman --- arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c | 9 +++++++-- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) --- a/arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c +++ b/arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c @@ -326,8 +326,13 @@ static void xen_spin_unlock(struct raw_s smp_wmb(); /* make sure no writes get moved after unlock */ xl->lock = 0; /* release lock */ - /* make sure unlock happens before kick */ - barrier(); + /* + * Make sure unlock happens before checking for waiting + * spinners. We need a strong barrier to enforce the + * write-read ordering to different memory locations, as the + * CPU makes no implied guarantees about their ordering. + */ + mb(); if (unlikely(xl->spinners)) xen_spin_unlock_slow(xl); -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/