linux-kernel - [PATCH locking/Documentation 1/2] Add note of release-acquire store vulnerability

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Message-Id: <20160929155401.GA5097@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Date:   Thu, 29 Sep 2016 08:54:01 -0700
From:   "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Cc:     mingo@...nel.org, dhowells@...hat.com, will.deacon@....com,
        peterz@...radead.org, stern@...land.harvard.edu
Subject: [PATCH locking/Documentation 1/2] Add note of release-acquire store
 vulnerability

If two processes are related by a RELEASE+ACQUIRE pair, ordering can be
broken if a third process overwrites the value written by the RELEASE
operation before the ACQUIRE operation has a chance of reading it.
This commit therefore updates the documentation to call this vulnerability
out explicitly.

Reported-by: Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
---
 Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 12 ++++++++----
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index ba818ecce6f9..a57679ec9441 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -490,14 +490,18 @@ And a couple of implicit varieties:
      the subsection "MMIO write barrier").  In addition, a RELEASE+ACQUIRE
      pair is -not- guaranteed to act as a full memory barrier.  However, after
      an ACQUIRE on a given variable, all memory accesses preceding any prior
-     RELEASE on that same variable are guaranteed to be visible.  In other
-     words, within a given variable's critical section, all accesses of all
-     previous critical sections for that variable are guaranteed to have
-     completed.
+     RELEASE on that same variable in that same chain of RELEASE+ACQUIRE
+     pairs are guaranteed to be visible.  In other words, within a given
+     variable's critical section, all accesses of all previous critical
+     sections for that variable are guaranteed to have completed.
 
      This means that ACQUIRE acts as a minimal "acquire" operation and
      RELEASE acts as a minimal "release" operation.
 
+     However, please note that a chain of RELEASE+ACQUIRE pairs may be
+     broken by a store by another thread that overwrites the RELEASE
+     operation's store before the ACQUIRE operation's read.
+
 A subset of the atomic operations described in atomic_ops.txt have ACQUIRE
 and RELEASE variants in addition to fully-ordered and relaxed (no barrier
 semantics) definitions.  For compound atomics performing both a load and a
-- 
2.5.2