linux-kernel - Re: "Verifying and Optimizing Compact NUMA-Aware Locks on Weak Memory Models"

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Date:   Fri, 26 Aug 2022 13:10:39 -0400
From:   Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...nel.org>, parri.andrea@...il.com,
        will@...nel.org, boqun.feng@...il.com, npiggin@...il.com,
        dhowells@...hat.com, j.alglave@....ac.uk, luc.maranget@...ia.fr,
        akiyks@...il.com, dlustig@...dia.com, joel@...lfernandes.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-arch@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: "Verifying and Optimizing Compact NUMA-Aware Locks on Weak
 Memory Models"

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 06:23:24PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 05:48:12AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > I have not yet done more than glance at this one, but figured I should
> > send it along sooner rather than later.
> > 
> > "Verifying and Optimizing Compact NUMA-Aware Locks on Weak
> > Memory Models", Antonio Paolillo, Hernán Ponce-de-León, Thomas
> > Haas, Diogo Behrens, Rafael Chehab, Ming Fu, and Roland Meyer.
> > https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15240
> > 
> > The claim is that the queued spinlocks implementation with CNA violates
> > LKMM but actually works on all architectures having a formal hardware
> > memory model.
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> So the paper mentions the following defects:
> 
>  - LKMM doesn't carry a release-acquire chain across a relaxed op

That's right, although I'm not so sure this should be considered a 
defect...

>  - some babbling about a missing propagation -- ISTR Linux if stuffed
>    full of them, specifically we require stores to auto propagate
>    without help from barriers

Not a missing propagation; a late one.

Don't understand what you mean by "auto propagate without help from 
barriers".

>  - some handoff that is CNA specific and I've not looked too hard at
>    presently.
> 
> 
> I think we should address that first one in LKMM, it seems very weird to
> me a RmW would break the chain like that.

An explicitly relaxed RMW (atomic_cmpxchg_relaxed(), to be precise).

If the authors wanted to keep the release-acquire chain intact, why not 
use a cmpxchg version that has release semantics instead of going out of 
their way to use a relaxed version?

To put it another way, RMW accesses and release-acquire accesses are 
unrelated concepts.  You can have one without the other (in principle, 
anyway).  So a relaxed RMW is just as capable of breaking a 
release-acquire chain as any other relaxed operation is.

>  Is there actual hardware that
> doesn't behave?

Not as far as I know, although that isn't very far.  Certainly an 
other-multicopy-atomic architecture would make the litmus test succeed.  
But the LKMM does not require other-multicopy-atomicity.

Alan