Paul E. McKenney wrote:
On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 02:30:32PM +0400, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
Documentation/atomic_ops.txt (182dd4b277177e8465ad11cd9f85f282946b5578)
says that pointers, longs, ints, and chars are stored and loaded atomically.

But GCC actually may split assignment to 'long' variable into two instructions.
see example in http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55981

GCC also splits assignments to 'volatile' variables and this is actually a bug 
in gcc.

volatile unsigned long y;

y = 0x100000001ul;

   400728:      c7 05 66 06 20 00 01    movl   $0x1,0x200666(%rip)        # 
600d98<y>
   40072f:      00 00 00
   400732:      c7 05 60 06 20 00 01    movl   $0x1,0x200660(%rip)        # 
600d9c<y+0x4>
   400739:      00 00 00

fortunately for y = 0; it generates this:

   40071d:      48 c7 05 70 06 20 00    movq   $0x0,0x200670(%rip)        # 
600d98<y>
   400724:      00 00 00 00

Thus NULL is safe, but constant ERR_PTR may be dangerous.

Probably rcu_assign_pointer() should use ACCESS_ONCE() around lvalue, because
splitting assignment for non-volatile variable seems like completely valid,
but this may help only after fixing that bug in GCC.

Good catch!  I has queued the following patch.

                                                        Thanx, Paul

------------------------------------------------------------------------

rcu: Add ACCESS_ONCE() to rcu_assign_pointer()

GCC may split assignment to 'long' variable into two instructions:

volatile unsigned long y;

y = 0x100000001ul;

        movl   $0x1,0x200666(%rip)
        movl   $0x1,0x200660(%rip)

This commit fixes this by applying ACCESS_ONCE() within
__rcu_assign_pointer(), but note that some versions and architectures
of GCC have a bug that defeats ACCESS_ONCE():

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55981

I added a comment to this bug report asking that the bug be fixed for
volatiles as well as atomics, citing a device driver storing a constant
into a 64-bit device register as motivation.

Reported-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov<khlebni...@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney<paul...@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

diff --git a/include/linux/rcupdate.h b/include/linux/rcupdate.h
index 9ed2c9a..3435174 100644
--- a/include/linux/rcupdate.h
+++ b/include/linux/rcupdate.h
@@ -556,7 +556,7 @@ static inline void rcu_preempt_sleep_check(void)
  #define __rcu_assign_pointer(p, v, space) \
        do { \
                smp_wmb(); \
-               (p) = (typeof(*v) __force space *)(v); \
+               ACCESS_ONCE(p) = (typeof(*v) __force space *)(v); \
        } while (0)

Seems like RCU_INIT_POINTER() need this too.




--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Reply via email to