linux-kernel - Re: Possibility of conflicting memory types in lazier TLB mode?

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Date:   Fri, 15 May 2020 15:24:28 -0400
From:   Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>
To:     Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>
Cc:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, x86@...nel.org
Subject: Re: Possibility of conflicting memory types in lazier TLB mode?

On Fri, 2020-05-15 at 16:50 +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> 
> But what about if there are (real, not speculative) stores in the
> store 
> queue still on the lazy thread from when it was switched, that have
> not 
> yet become coherent? The page is freed by another CPU and reallocated
> for something that maps it as nocache. Do you have a coherency
> problem 
> there?
> 
> Ensuring the store queue is drained when switching to lazy seems like
> it 
> would fix it, maybe context switch code does that already or you
> have 
> some other trick or reason it's not a problem. Am I way off base
> here?

On x86, all stores become visible in-order globally.

I suspect that
means any pending stores in the queue
would become visible to the rest of the system before
the store to the "current" cpu-local variable, as
well as other writes from the context switch code
become visible to the rest of the system.

Is that too naive a way of preventing the scenario you
describe?

What am I overlooking?

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