Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] restartable sequences v2: fast user-space percpu critical sections

Mathieu Desnoyers
2016-04-08T17:46:42Z

----- On Apr 7, 2016, at 10:05 PM, Mathieu Desnoyers mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com wrote:

> ----- On Apr 7, 2016, at 9:21 PM, Andy Lutomirski luto@amacapital.net wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 6:11 PM, Mathieu Desnoyers
>> <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> wrote:
>>> ----- On Apr 7, 2016, at 6:05 PM, Andy Lutomirski luto@amacapital.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 09:43:33AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>>>
>>>>>> it's inherently debuggable,
>>>>>
>>>>> It is more debuggable, agreed.
>>>>>
>>>>>> and it allows multiple independent
>>>>>> rseq-protected things to coexist without forcing each other to abort.
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> My understanding is that the main goal of this rather more complex
>>> proposal is to make interaction with debuggers more straightforward in
>>> cases of single-stepping through the rseq critical section.
>>
>> The things I like about my proposal are both that you can single-step
>> through it just like any other code as long as you pin the thread to a
>> CPU and that it doesn't make preemption magical. (Of course, you can
>> *force* it to do something on resume and/or preemption by sticking a
>> bogus value in the expected event count field, but that's not the
>> intended use. Hmm, I guess it does need to hook preemption and/or
>> resume for all processes that enable the thing so it can know to check
>> for an enabled post_commit_rip, just like all the other proposals.)
>>
>> Also, mine lets you have a fairly long-running critical section that
>> doesn't get aborted under heavy load and can interleave with other
>> critical sections that don't conflict.
>
> Yes, those would be nice advantages. I'll have to do a few more
> pseudo-code and execution scenarios to get a better understanding of
> your idea.
>
>>
>>>
>>> I recently came up with a scheme that should allow us to handle such
>>> situations in a fashion similar to debuggers handling ll/sc
>>> restartable sequences of instructions on e.g. powerpc. The good news
>>> is that my scheme does not require anything at the kernel level.
>>>
>>> The idea is simple: the userspace rseq critical sections now
>>> become marked by 3 inline functions (rather than 2 in Paul's proposal):
>>>
>>> rseq_start(void *rseq_key)
>>> rseq_finish(void *rseq_key)
>>> rseq_abort(void *rseq_key)
>>
>> How do you use this thing? What are its semantics?
>
> You define one rseq_key variable (dummy 1 byte variable, can be an
> empty structure) for each rseq critical section you have in your
> program.
>
> A rseq critical section will typically have one entry point (rseq_start),
> and one exit point (rseq_finish). I'm saying "typically" because there
> may be more than one entry point, and more than one exit point per
> critical section.
>
> Entry and exit points mark the beginning and end of each rseq critical
> section. rseq_start loads the sequence counter from the TLS and copies
> it onto the stack. It then gets passed to rseq_finish() to be compared
> with the final seqnum TLS value just before the commit. rseq_finish is
> the one responsible for storing into the post_commit_instr field of the
> TLS and populating rcx with the failure insn label address. rseq_finish()
> does the commit.
>
> And there is rseq_abort(), which would need to be called if we just want
> to exit from a rseq critical section without doing the commit (no matching
> call to rseq_finish after a rseq_start).
>
> Each of rseq_start, finish, and abort would need to receive a pointer
> to the rseq_key as parameter.
>
> rseq_start would return the sequence number read from the TLS.
>
> rseq_finish would also receive as parameter that sequence number that has
> been returned by rseq_start.
>
> Does it make sense ?

By the way, the debugger can always decide to single-step through the
first iteration of the rseq, and then after it loops, decide to skip
single-stepping until the exit points are reached.

Thanks,

Mathieu

>
> Thanks,
>
> Mathieu
>
>
>>
>> --Andy
>>
>>>
>>> We associate each critical section with a unique "key" (dummy
>>> 1 byte object in the process address space), so we can group
>>> them. The new "rseq_abort" would mark exit points that would
>>> exit the critical section without executing the final commit
>>> instruction.
>>>
>>> Within each of rseq_start, rseq_finish and rseq_abort,
>>> we declare a non-loadable section that gets populated
>>> with the following tuples:
>>>
>>> (RSEQ_TYPE, insn address, rseq_key)
>>>
>>> Where RSEQ_TYPE is either RSEQ_START, RSEQ_FINISH, or RSEQ_ABORT.
>>>
>>> That special section would be found in the executable by the
>>> debugger, which can then skip over entire restartable critical
>>> sections when it encounters them by placing breakpoints at
>>> all exit points (finish and cancel) associated to the same
>>> rseq_key as the entry point (start).
>>>
>>> This way we don't need to complexify the runtime code, neither
>>> at kernel nor user-space level, and we get debuggability using
>>> a trick similar to what ll/sc architectures already need to do.
>>>
>>> Of course, this requires extending gdb, which should not be
>>> a show-stopper.
>>>
>>> Thoughts ?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Mathieu
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mathieu Desnoyers
>>> EfficiOS Inc.
>>> http://www.efficios.com
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Andy Lutomirski
>> AMA Capital Management, LLC
>
> --
> Mathieu Desnoyers
> EfficiOS Inc.
> http://www.efficios.com

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.