Re: start_kernel(): bug: interrupts were enabled early

H. Peter Anvin
2010-04-01T16:21:28Z

On 03/31/2010 11:48 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-03-31 at 23:33 -0400, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> Just a few instructions, I guess. But we can do it with zero.
>>
>> And from a design POV, pretending that down_read()/down_write() can be
>> called with interrupts disabled is daft - they cannot! Why muck up
>> the
>> usual code paths with this startup-specific hack?
>
> Because we the problem of when interrupts are enabled for the first time
> is a nasty one, and having entire layer of things not usable at the
> right level of init because somewhere something might do an irq enable
> due to calling generic code that down's a semaphore is a PITA.
>
> Seriously, Andrew, I don't see a clean solution... Something -somewhere-
> will have to be ugly.
>
> Allocation is a pretty basic service that a lot of stuff expect
> especially when booting.
>
> We went through that discussion before when we moved the SLAB init
> earlier during boot, because it makes no sense to have tons of code to
> have to figure out what allocator to call depending on what phase of the
> moon it's called from (especially when said code can also be called
> later during boot, say for hotplug reasons).
>
> So we moved sl*b init earlier, thus we ought to be able to also
> kmem_cache_alloc() earlier. We -fixed- that problem already afaik.

I would like to point out that initialization is a particular subcase of
a more general rule:

- It is safe to call a semaphore/rwlock down with IRQ disabled *if and
only if* the caller can guarantee non-contention.

Initialization is an obvious subcase, but there might be others.

-hpa

--
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.