Re: [PATCH] arm64: mm: force write fault for atomic RMW instructions

Catalin Marinas
2024-05-17T17:25:46Z

On Fri, May 17, 2024 at 09:30:23AM -0700, Yang Shi wrote:
> On 5/14/24 3:39 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > It would be good to understand why openjdk is doing this instead of a
> > plain write. Is it because it may be racing with some other threads
> > already using the heap? That would be a valid pattern.
>
> Yes, you are right. I think I quoted the JVM justification in earlier email,
> anyway they said "permit use of memory concurrently with pretouch".

Ah, sorry, I missed that. This seems like a valid reason.

> > A point Will raised was on potential ABI changes introduced by this
> > patch. The ESR_EL1 reported to user remains the same as per the hardware
> > spec (read-only), so from a SIGSEGV we may have some slight behaviour
> > changes:
> >
> > 1. PTE invalid:
> >
> > a) vma is VM_READ && !VM_WRITE permission - SIGSEGV reported with
> > ESR_EL1.WnR == 0 in sigcontext with your patch. Without this
> > patch, the PTE is mapped as PTE_RDONLY first and a subsequent
> > fault will report SIGSEGV with ESR_EL1.WnR == 1.
>
> I think I can do something like the below conceptually:
>
> if is_el0_atomic_instr && !is_write_abort
>     force_write = true
>
> if VM_READ && !VM_WRITE && force_write == true

Nit: write implies read, so you only need to check !write.

>     vm_flags = VM_READ
>     mm_flags ~= FAULT_FLAG_WRITE
>
> Then we just fallback to read fault. The following write fault will trigger
> SIGSEGV with consistent ABI.

I think this should work. So instead of reporting the write fault
directly in case of a read-only vma, we let the core code handle the
read fault and first and we retry the atomic instruction.

> > b) vma is !VM_READ && !VM_WRITE permission - SIGSEGV reported with
> > ESR_EL1.WnR == 0, so no change from current behaviour, unless we
> > fix the patch for (1.a) to fake the WnR bit which would change the
> > current expectations.
> >
> > 2. PTE valid with PTE_RDONLY - we get a normal writeable fault in
> > hardware, no need to fix ESR_EL1 up.
> >
> > The patch would have to address (1) above but faking the ESR_EL1.WnR bit
> > based on the vma flags looks a bit fragile.
>
> I think we don't need to fake the ESR_EL1.WnR bit with the fallback.

I agree, with your approach above we don't need to fake WnR.

> > Similarly, we have userfaultfd that reports the fault to user. I think
> > in scenario (1) the kernel will report UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WRITE with
> > your patch but no UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WP. Without this patch, there are
> > indeed two faults, with the second having both UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WP
> > and UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WRITE set.
>
> I don't quite get what the problem is. IIUC, uffd just needs a signal from
> kernel to tell this area will be written. It seems not break the semantic.
> Added Peter Xu in this loop, who is the uffd developer. He may shed some
> light.

Not really familiar with uffd but just looking at the code, if a handler
is registered for both MODE_MISSING and MODE_WP, currently the atomic
instruction signals a user fault without UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WRITE (the
do_anonymous_page() path). If the page is mapped by the uffd handler as
the zero page, a restart of the instruction would signal
UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WRITE and UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WP (the do_wp_page()
path).

With your patch, we get the equivalent of UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WRITE on
the first attempt, just like having a STR instruction instead of
separate LDR + STR (as the atomics behave from a fault perspective).

However, I don't think that's a problem, the uffd handler should cope
with an STR anyway, so it's not some unexpected combination of flags.

--
Catalin