SGX runtimes such as Gramine may implement EDMM-based lazy allocation of enclave pages and may support MADV_DONTNEED semantics [1]. The former implies #PF-based page allocation, and the latter implies the usage of SGX_IOC_ENCLAVE_REMOVE_PAGES ioctl.
EDMM-based lazy allocation and MADV_DONTNEED semantics provide significant performance improvement for some workloads that run on Gramine. For example, a Java workload with a 16GB enclave size has approx. 57x improvement in total runtime. Thus, we consider it important to permit these optimizations in Gramine. However, we observed hangs of applications (Node.js, PyTorch, R, iperf, Blender, Nginx) when run on Gramine with EDMM, lazy allocation and MADV_DONTNEED features enabled. We wrote a trivial stress test to reproduce the hangs observed in real-world applications. The test stresses #PF-based page allocation and SGX_IOC_ENCLAVE_REMOVE_PAGES flows in the SGX driver: /* repeatedly touch different enclave pages at random and mix with * madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) to stress EAUG/EREMOVE flows */ static void* thread_func(void* arg) { size_t num_pages = 0xA000 / page_size; for (int i = 0; i < 5000; i++) { size_t page = get_random_ulong() % num_pages; char data = READ_ONCE(((char*)arg)[page * page_size]); page = get_random_ulong() % num_pages; madvise(arg + page * page_size, page_size, MADV_DONTNEED); } } addr = mmap(NULL, 0xA000, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0); pthread_t threads[16]; for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) pthread_create(&threads[i], NULL, thread_func, addr); This test uncovers two data races in the SGX driver. The remaining patches describe and fix these races. I performed several stress tests to verify that there are no other data races (at least with the test program above): - On Icelake server with 128GB of PRM, without madvise(). This stresses the first data race. A Gramine SGX test suite running in the background for additional stressing. Result: 1,000 runs without hangs (result without the first bug fix: hangs every time). - On Icelake server with 128GB of PRM, with madvise(). This stresses the second data race. A Gramine SGX test suite running in the background for additional stressing. Result: 1,000 runs without hangs (result with the first bug fix but without the second bug fix: hangs approx. once in 50 runs). - On Icelake server with 4GB of PRM, with madvise(). This additionally stresses the enclave page swapping flows. Two Gramine SGX test suites running in the background for additional stressing of swapping (I observe 100% CPU utilization from ksgxd which confirms that swapping happens). Result: 1,000 runs without hangs. [1] https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/pull/1513 v2 -> v3: - No changes in code itself - Improved commit message of the first patch (text suggested by Dave Hansen); kept the CPU1 vs CPU2 diagram (as all reviewers liked it) - No changes in the commit message of the second patch v1 -> v2: - No changes in code itself - Expanded cover letter - Added CPU1 vs CPU2 race scenarios in commit messages v1: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240429104330.3636113-3-dmitrii.kuvais...@intel.com/ v2: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240515131240.1304824-1-dmitrii.kuvais...@intel.com/ Dmitrii Kuvaiskii (2): x86/sgx: Resolve EAUG race where losing thread returns SIGBUS x86/sgx: Resolve EREMOVE page vs EAUG page data race arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/encl.c | 10 +++++++--- arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/encl.h | 3 +++ arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/ioctl.c | 1 + 3 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) -- 2.34.1