Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 29 Sep 2016 09:44:45 -0700 | From | "Paul E. McKenney" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH locking/Documentation 1/2] Add note of release-acquire store vulnerability |
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On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 06:17:38PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 05:03:08PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 05:58:17PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > > On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 08:54:01AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > > > 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@rowland.harvard.edu> > > > > Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> > > > > > > > + 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. > > > > > > This is the powerpc lwsync quirk, right? Where the barrier disappears > > > when it looses the store. > > > > > > Or is there more to it? Its not entirely clear from the Changelog, which > > > I feel should describe the reason for the behaviour. > > > > If I've groked it correctly, it's for cases like: > > > > > > PO: > > Wx=1 > > WyRel=1 > > > > P1: > > Wy=2 > > > > P2: > > RyAcq=2 > > Rx=0 > > > > Final value of y is 2. > > > > > > This is permitted on arm64. If you make P1's store a store-release, then > > it's forbidden, but I suspect that's not generally true of the kernel > > memory model. > > Right, I think that on PowerPC, even if P1 does store-release you can > still get this, since the two stores conflict one can loose out, and the > lwsync associated with the loosing store gets removed along with it. > > So yes, I think this needs more clarification.
Whether the store is loose or not, yes, putting an lwsync as the first instruction in a given task has no effect. ;-)
Thanx, Paul
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