linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] futex: introduce an optimistic spinning futex

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:41:42 -0700
From:	Darren Hart <dvhart@...ux.intel.com>
To:	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
CC:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@...com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
	Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@...com>,
	Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@...ibm.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-doc@...r.kernel.org" <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>,
	Jason Low <jason.low2@...com>,
	Scott J Norton <scott.norton@...com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] futex: introduce an optimistic spinning futex

On 7/21/14, 14:47, "Thomas Gleixner" <tglx@...utronix.de> wrote:

>On Mon, 21 Jul 2014, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 2:27 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
>>wrote:
>> > All this is predicated on the fact that syscalls are 'expensive'.
>> > Weren't syscalls only 100s of cycles? All this bitmap mucking is far
>> > more expensive due to cacheline misses, which due to the size of the
>> > things is almost guaranteed.
>> 
>> 120 - 300 cycles for me, unless tracing happens, and I'm working on
>> reducing the incidence of tracing.
>
>So it's a non issue indeed and definitely not worth the trouble of
>that extra storage, the scheduler overhead, etc.
>
>Summary: Once you can't take it atomically in user space, you've lost
>	 anyway. And we are better off to do the magic spinning in
>	 kernel where we have all the information accessible already.

And we have such an implementation with the FUTEX_LOCK_ADAPTIVE code we
discussed back in Oct 2010 (purely kernel, no VDSO), updated with some of
your and other's comments:

http://git.infradead.org/users/dvhart/linux.git/shortlog/refs/heads/futex/f
utex-lock/v7


I can work on forward porting this series to current mainline (post recent
security fixes) and cleaning up the commentary and such if people are
interested in seeing this implementation (based on Peter Z's spinning
mutex work iirc) resurrected...

-- 
Darren Hart					Open Source Technology Center
darren.hart@...el.com				            Intel Corporation



--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/