Subject: Re: linux-next: manual merge of the rcu tree with the tip tree

From: Mathieu Desnoyers <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 15:40:32 +0000 (UTC)

----- On Aug 1, 2017, at 10:15 AM, Andy Lutomirski [email-masked] wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 7:02 AM, Mathieu Desnoyers
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> /*
>>  * The full memory barrier implied by mm_cpumask update operations
>>  * is required by the membarrier system call.
>>  */
>>
>> What we want to order here is:
>>
>> prev userspace memory accesses
>> schedule
>>   <full mb> (it's already there) [A]
>>   update to rq->curr changing the rq->curr->mm value
>>   <full mb> (provided by mm_cpumask updates in switch_mm on x86) [B]
> 
> If I understand this right, the issue with relying on CR3 writes is
> that the target CPU could switch to a kernel thread and back to the
> same user mm white the membarrier caller is reading its mm, right?

The current implementation of context_switch() does:

        mm = next->mm;
        oldmm = prev->active_mm;

        if (!mm)
                next->active_mm = oldmm;

        if (!prev->mm) {
                prev->active_mm = NULL;
                rq->prev_mm = oldmm;
        }

so basically the only way to have a non-null rq->prev_mm when we
reach finish_task_switch() is to have a non-null prev->active_mm
in context_switch (kernel thread).

finish_task_switch() has:

struct mm_struct *mm = rq->prev_mm;
[...]
if (mm)
        mmdrop(mm);

which issues a full memory barrier through atomic_dec_and_test(). This
happens to take care of this kthread->uthread scenario. I think it would
be important to document though.

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com