Re: [RFC PATCH 4/7] x86: use exit_lazy_tlb rather than membarrier_mm_sync_core_before_usermode

Peter Zijlstra
2020-07-16T08:50:52Z

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 10:18:20PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > On Jul 15, 2020, at 9:15 PM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:

> > CPU0 CPU1
> > 1. user stuff
> > a. membarrier() 2. enter kernel
> > b. read rq->curr 3. rq->curr switched to kthread
> > c. is kthread, skip IPI 4. switch_to kthread
> > d. return to user 5. rq->curr switched to user thread
> > 6. switch_to user thread
> > 7. exit kernel
> > 8. more user stuff

> I find it hard to believe that this is x86 only. Why would thread
> switch imply core sync on any architecture? Is x86 unique in having a
> stupid expensive core sync that is heavier than smp_mb()?

smp_mb() is nowhere near the most expensive barrier we have in Linux,
mb() might qualify, since that has some completion requirements since it
needs to serialize against external actors.

On x86_64 things are rather murky, we have:

LOCK prefix -- which implies smp_mb() before and after RmW
LFENCE -- which used to be rmb like, until Spectre, and now it
is ISYNC like. Since ISYNC ensures an empty pipeline,
it also implies all loads are retired (and therefore
complete) it implies rmb.
MFENCE -- which is a memop completion barrier like, it makes
sure all previously issued memops are complete.

if you read that carefully, you'll note you'll have to use LFENCE +
MFENCE to order against non-memops instructions.

But none of them imply dumping the instruction decoder caches, that only
happens on core serializing instructions like CR3 writes, IRET, CPUID
and a few others, I think we recently got a SERIALIZE instruction to add
to this list.

On ARM64 there's something a whole different set of barriers, and again
smp_mb() isn't nowhere near the top of the list. They have roughly 3
classes:

ISB -- instruction sync barrier
DMB(x) -- memory ordering in domain x
DSB(x) -- memory completion in domain x

And they have at least 3 domains (IIRC), system, outer, inner.

The ARM64 __switch_to() includes a dsb(sy), just like PowerPC used to
have a SYNC, but since PowerPC is rare for only having one rediculously
heavy serializing instruction, we got to re-use the smp_mb() early in
__schedule() instead, but ARM64 can't do that.

So rather than say that x86 is special here, I'd say that PowerPC is
special here.

> But I’m wondering if all this deferred sync stuff is wrong. In the
> brave new world of io_uring and such, perhaps kernel access matter
> too. Heck, even:

IIRC the membarrier SYNC_CORE use-case is about user-space
self-modifying code.

Userspace re-uses a text address and needs to SYNC_CORE before it can be
sure the old text is forgotten. Nothing the kernel does matters there.

I suppose the manpage could be more clear there.