linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH] Fix a race between rwsem and the scheduler

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Date:   Thu, 01 Sep 2016 07:47:10 +1000
From:   Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:     Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
        Balbir Singh <bsingharora@...il.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Nicholas Piggin <nicholas.piggin@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] Fix a race between rwsem and the scheduler

On Wed, 2016-08-31 at 15:31 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 07:28:18AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On powerpc we have a sync deep in _switch to achieve that.
> 
> OK, for giggles, could you (or Balbir) check what happens if you take
> that sync out?
> 
> There should be enough serialization in the generic code to cover the
> case that code mentions.
> 
> ARM64 has a stronger barrier in its context switch code, but that's
> because they need to sync against external agents (like their TLB and
> cache) and no amount of generic locking is going to cover that.

The problem is no amount of testing can tell you it works for sure :-)

I would be nervous not having a real full sync in _switch. All we have
along the scheduler path is lwsync's and our isync based load construct
for spin_lock, I'm not sure what other assumptions we have around that
sync in there...

Cheers,
Ben.