Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] sched: fix race between sched_move_domain() and vcpu_wake()

[Keir Fraser <keir.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/10/2013 08:12, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>>> On 10.10.13 at 20:27, Keir Fraser <keir.xen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 10/10/2013 19:01, "Andrew Cooper" <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>>> Just taking the lock for the old processor seemed sufficient to me as
>>>> anything seeing the new value would lock and unlock using the same new
>>>> value.  But do we need to take the schedule_lock for the new processor
>>>> as well (in the right order of course)?
>>> 
>>> David and I have been discussing this for a while, involving a
>>> whiteboard, and not come to a firm conclusion either way.
>>> 
>>> From my point of view, holding the appropriate vcpu schedule lock
>>> entitles you to play with vcpu scheduling state, which involves
>>> following v->sched_priv which we update outside the critical region later.
>>> 
>>> Only taking the one lock still leaves a race condition where another cpu
>>> can follow the new v->processor and obtain the schedule lock, at which
>>> point we have two threads both working on the internals of a vcpu.  The
>>> change below certainly will fix the current bug of locking one spinlock
>>> and unlocking another.
>>> 
>>> My gut feeling is that we do need to take both locks to be safe in terms
>>> of data access, but we would appreciate advice from someone more
>>> familiar with the scheduler locking.
>> 
>> If it's that tricky to work out, why not just take the two locks,
>> appropriately ordered? This isn't a hot path.
> 
> Shouldn't we rather fix the locking mechanism itself, making
> vcpu_schedule_lock...() return the lock, such that the unlock
> will unavoidably use the correct lock?
> 
> That would at once allow dropping vcpu_schedule_unlock...()
> altogether, which would be a good thing even if only considering
> the explicit uses of local_irq_disable() there (instead of using the
> right spin lock primitives). And if done that way, replacing the
> explicit uses of local_irq_enable() in the locking paths would also
> seem rather desirable - after all this defeats the spin lock
> primitives wanting to re-enable interrupts while waiting for a
> lock.

It feels to me like this is separate from Andrew's concern. Also I think
that holding the schedule_lock should protect you from changes to
v->processor. But if that's really unreasonable (e.g., inefficient) then
your suggestion here is perfectly sensible.

Improving the vcpu_schedule_lock_irq implementations to use the providied
underlying spin_lock_irq functions would also be nice, I guess :)

 -- Keir

> Jan
> 



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