Re: [patch] mm: fix anon_vma races

Hugh Dickins
2008-10-20T18:21:54Z

On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> >
> > When you say "to the point where we don't need to care about anything
> > else", are you there agreeing with Nick that your smp_wmb() and
> > smp_read_barrier_depends() are no longer needed?
>
> Yes. The anon_vma only has two fields: the spinlock itself, and the list.
> And with all list allocations being inside the spinlock, and with the
> spinlock itself being a memory barrier, I'm now convinced that the worry
> about memory ordering was unnecessary.

Okay, thanks, that's a relief. I'm afraid that once a barrier discussion
comes up and we insert them, then I become dazedly paranoid and it's very
hard to shake me from seeing a need for barriers everywhere, including a
barrier before and after every barrier ad infinitum to make sure they're
really barriers.

I still get a twinge of anxiety seeing anon_vma_prepare()'s unlocked
if (unlikely(!anon_vma)) {
since it looks like the kind of thing that can be a problem. But on
reflection, I guess there are lots and lots of places where we do such
opportunistic checks before going the slow path taking the lock.

>
> Well, not unnecessary, because I think the discussion was good, and I
> think we fixed another bug,

Yes, that was a valuable find, which Nick's ctor aberration led us to.
Though whether it ever bit anyone, I doubt. We did have a spate of
anon_vma corruptions 2.5 years ago, but I think they were just one
manifestation of some more general slab corruption, don't match this.

> but the smp_wmb++smp_read_barrier_depends does
> seem to be a non-issue in this path.
>
> > But this is all _irrelevant_ : the tricky test to worry about in
> > page_lock_anon_vma() is of page_mapped() i.e. does this page currently
> > have any ptes in userspace, not of page_mapping() or page->mapping.
>
> I'm not arguing for removing the page_mapped() we have now, I'm just
> wondering about the one Nick wanted to add at the end.

Oh, that, sorry I didn't realize - but there again, it was well
worth my writing it down again, else I wouldn't have corrected
my embarrassingly mistaken goahead to Nick on moving the check.

[snipped a lot of good understanding of how it works]

> So what I'm trying to figure out is why Nick wanted to add another check
> for page_mapped(). I'm not seeing what it is supposed to protect against.

I think it's a matter of mental comfort, or good interface design.

You're right that it will make no actual difference to what happens
in its two sole callers page_referenced_anon() and try_to_unmap_anon(),
beyond adding an extra branch to short-circuit a futile search which
would already terminate after the first iteration (each loop already
has a page_mapped test, to get out a.s.a.p. if the list is very long).

But (particularly because he didn't realize it could happen: I put
no comment there beyond "tricky") he thinks it would be better to
know that when you emerge from a successful page_lock_anon_vma(),
then the anon_vma you have is indeed still the right one for the
page (as you noted, we do assume caller holds a reference on page).

One might argue that a comment would be better than a runtime test:
so long as page_lock_anon_vma() is a static function with just those
two callers.

In writing this, another barrier anxiety crossed my mind. I've made
a big deal of checking page_mapped after getting rcu_read_lock, but
now I wonder if another barrier is needed for that.

Documentation/memory-barriers.txt "LOCKING FUNCTIONS" groups RCU along
with spin locks in discussing their semipermeable characteristics, so
I guess no extra barrier needed; but it does work rather differently.

In CLASSIC_RCU the preempt_disable() has a compiler barrier() but
not any processor *mb(). As I understand it, that's fine because if
page->_mapcount was loaded before the preempt_disable and we don't
preempt before the preempt_disable, then so what, that's okay; and
if we are preempted immediately before the preempt_disable, then
all the business of context switch is sure to reload it again after.

In PREEMPT_RCU? I don't know, that's some study I've never got
around to; but I think you and Peter will know whether it's good.

Hugh