Re: [RFC][PATCH] Fix a race between rwsem and the scheduler

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, 2016-08-31 at 15:31 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 07:28:18AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On powerpc we have a sync deep in _switch to achieve that.
> 
> OK, for giggles, could you (or Balbir) check what happens if you take
> that sync out?
> 
> There should be enough serialization in the generic code to cover the
> case that code mentions.
> 
> ARM64 has a stronger barrier in its context switch code, but that's
> because they need to sync against external agents (like their TLB and
> cache) and no amount of generic locking is going to cover that.

The problem is no amount of testing can tell you it works for sure :-)

I would be nervous not having a real full sync in _switch. All we have
along the scheduler path is lwsync's and our isync based load construct
for spin_lock, I'm not sure what other assumptions we have around that
sync in there...

Cheers,
Ben.