linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64: Support the TSO memory model

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Date: Tue, 07 May 2024 11:24:18 +0100
From: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@...aro.org>
To: Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>
Cc: Hector Martin <marcan@...can.st>,  Catalin Marinas
 <catalin.marinas@....com>,  Marc Zyngier <maz@...nel.org>,  Mark Rutland
 <mark.rutland@....com>,  Zayd Qumsieh <zayd_qumsieh@...le.com>,  Justin Lu
 <ih_justin@...le.com>,  Ryan Houdek <Houdek.Ryan@...-emu.org>,  Mark Brown
 <broonie@...nel.org>,  Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@...nel.org>,  Mateusz Guzik
 <mjguzik@...il.com>,  Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@....com>,
  Oliver Upton <oliver.upton@...ux.dev>,  Miguel Luis
 <miguel.luis@...cle.com>,  Joey Gouly <joey.gouly@....com>,  Christoph
 Paasch <cpaasch@...le.com>,  Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,  Sami
 Tolvanen <samitolvanen@...gle.com>,  Baoquan He <bhe@...hat.com>,  Joel
 Granados <j.granados@...sung.com>,  Dawei Li <dawei.li@...ngroup.cn>,
  Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,  Florent Revest
 <revest@...omium.org>,  David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>,  Stefan
 Roesch <shr@...kernel.io>,  Andy Chiu <andy.chiu@...ive.com>,  Josh
 Triplett <josh@...htriplett.org>,  Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,  Helge
 Deller <deller@....de>,  Zev Weiss <zev@...ilderbeest.net>,  Ondrej
 Mosnacek <omosnace@...hat.com>,  Miguel Ojeda <ojeda@...nel.org>,
  linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,  linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
  Asahi Linux <asahi@...ts.linux.dev>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64: Support the TSO memory model

Will Deacon <will@...nel.org> writes:

> Hi Hector,
>
> On Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 09:51:19AM +0900, Hector Martin wrote:
>> x86 CPUs implement a stricter memory modern than ARM64 (TSO). For this
>> reason, x86 emulation on baseline ARM64 systems requires very expensive
>> memory model emulation. Having hardware that supports this natively is
>> therefore very attractive. Such hardware, in fact, exists. This series
>> adds support for userspace to identify when TSO is available and
>> toggle it on, if supported.
>
> I'm probably going to make myself hugely unpopular here, but I have a
> strong objection to this patch series as it stands. I firmly believe
> that providing a prctl() to query and toggle the memory model to/from
> TSO is going to lead to subtle fragmentation of arm64 Linux userspace.
>
> It's not difficult to envisage this TSO switch being abused for native
> arm64 applications:
>
>   * A program no longer crashes when TSO is enabled, so the developer
>     just toggles TSO to meet a deadline.
>
>   * Some legacy x86 sources are being ported to arm64 but concurrency
>     is hard so the developer just enables TSO to (mostly) avoid thinking
>     about it.
>
>   * Some binaries in a distribution exhibit instability which goes away
>     in TSO mode, so a taskset-like program is used to run them with TSO
>     enabled.

These all just seem like cases of engineers hiding from their very real
problems. I don't know if its really the kernels place to avoid giving
them the foot gun. Would it assuage your concerns at all if we set a
taint flag so bug reports/core dumps indicated we were in a
non-architectural memory mode?

> In all these cases, we end up with native arm64 applications that will
> either fail to load or will crash in subtle ways on CPUs without the TSO
> feature. Assuming that the application cannot be fixed, a better
> approach would be to recompile using stronger instructions (e.g.
> LDAR/STLR) so that at least the resulting binary is portable. Now, it's
> true that some existing CPUs are TSO by design (this is a perfectly
> valid implementation of the arm64 memory model), but I think there's a
> big difference between quietly providing more ordering guarantees than
> software may be relying on and providing a mechanism to discover,
> request and ultimately rely upon the stronger behaviour.

I think the main use case here is for emulation. When we run x86-on-arm
in QEMU we do currently insert lots of extra barrier instructions on
every load and store. If we can probe and set a TSO mode I can assure
you we'll do the right thing ;-)

-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro