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authorMathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca>2008-08-14 16:58:15 -0400
committerH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>2008-08-15 15:46:28 -0400
commitf88f07e0f0fd6376e081b10930d272a08fbf082f (patch)
tree65344da969981de464dd903e9cb326c0ae6dbed0 /arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c
parentb635acec48bcaa9183fcbf4e3955616b0d4119b5 (diff)
x86: alternatives : fix LOCK_PREFIX race with preemptible kernel and CPU hotplug
If a kernel thread is preempted in single-cpu mode right after the NOP (nop about to be turned into a lock prefix), then we CPU hotplug a CPU, and then the thread is scheduled back again, a SMP-unsafe atomic operation will be used on shared SMP variables, leading to corruption. No corruption would happen in the reverse case : going from SMP to UP is ok because we split a bit instruction into tiny pieces, which does not present this condition. Changing the 0x90 (single-byte nop) currently used into a 0x3E DS segment override prefix should fix this issue. Since the default of the atomic instructions is to use the DS segment anyway, it should not affect the behavior. The exception to this are references that use ESP/RSP and EBP/RBP as the base register (they will use the SS segment), however, in Linux (a) DS == SS at all times, and (b) we do not distinguish between segment violations reported as #SS as opposed to #GP, so there is no need to disassemble the instruction to figure out the suitable segment. This patch assumes that the 0x3E prefix will leave atomic operations as-is (thus assuming they normally touch data in the DS segment). Since there seem to be no obvious ill-use of other segment override prefixes for atomic operations, it should be safe. It can be verified with a quick grep -r LOCK_PREFIX include/asm-x86/ grep -A 1 -r LOCK_PREFIX arch/x86/ Taken from This source : AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Volume 3: General-Purpose and System Instructions States "Instructions that Reference a Non-Stack Segment—If an instruction encoding references any base register other than rBP or rSP, or if an instruction contains an immediate offset, the default segment is the data segment (DS). These instructions can use the segment-override prefix to select one of the non-default segments, as shown in Table 1-5." Therefore, forcing the DS segment on the atomic operations, which already use the DS segment, should not change. This source : http://wiki.osdev.org/X86_Instruction_Encoding States "In 64-bit the CS, SS, DS and ES segment overrides are ignored." Confirmed by "AMD 64-Bit Technology" A.7 http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/x86-64_overview.pdf "In 64-bit mode, the DS, ES, SS and CS segment-override prefixes have no effect. These four prefixes are no longer treated as segment-override prefixes in the context of multipleprefix rules. Instead, they are treated as null prefixes." This patch applies to 2.6.27-rc2, but would also have to be applied to earlier kernels (2.6.26, 2.6.25, ...). Performance impact of the fix : tests done on "xaddq" and "xaddl" shows it actually improves performances on Intel Xeon, AMD64, Pentium M. It does not change the performance on Pentium II, Pentium 3 and Pentium 4. Xeon E5405 2.0GHz : NR_TESTS 10000000 test empty cycles : 162207948 test test 1-byte nop xadd cycles : 170755422 test test DS override prefix xadd cycles : 170000118 * test test LOCK xadd cycles : 472012134 AMD64 2.0GHz : NR_TESTS 10000000 test empty cycles : 146674549 test test 1-byte nop xadd cycles : 150273860 test test DS override prefix xadd cycles : 149982382 * test test LOCK xadd cycles : 270000690 Pentium 4 3.0GHz NR_TESTS 10000000 test empty cycles : 290001195 test test 1-byte nop xadd cycles : 310000560 test test DS override prefix xadd cycles : 310000575 * test test LOCK xadd cycles : 1050103740 Pentium M 2.0GHz NR_TESTS 10000000 test empty cycles : 180000523 test test 1-byte nop xadd cycles : 320000345 test test DS override prefix xadd cycles : 310000374 * test test LOCK xadd cycles : 480000357 Pentium 3 550MHz NR_TESTS 10000000 test empty cycles : 510000231 test test 1-byte nop xadd cycles : 620000128 test test DS override prefix xadd cycles : 620000110 * test test LOCK xadd cycles : 800000088 Pentium II 350MHz NR_TESTS 10000000 test empty cycles : 200833494 test test 1-byte nop xadd cycles : 340000130 test test DS override prefix xadd cycles : 340000126 * test test LOCK xadd cycles : 530000078 Speed test modules can be found at http://ltt.polymtl.ca/svn/trunk/tests/kernel/test-prefix-speed-32.c http://ltt.polymtl.ca/svn/trunk/tests/kernel/test-prefix-speed.c Macro-benchmarks 2.0GHz E5405 Core 2 dual Quad-Core Xeon Summary * replace smp lock prefixes with DS segment selector prefixes no lock prefix (s) with lock prefix (s) Speedup make -j1 kernel/ 33.94 +/- 0.07 34.91 +/- 0.27 2.8 % hackbench 50 2.99 +/- 0.01 3.74 +/- 0.01 25.1 % * replace smp lock prefixes with 0x90 nops no lock prefix (s) with lock prefix (s) Speedup make -j1 kernel/ 34.16 +/- 0.32 34.91 +/- 0.27 2.2 % hackbench 50 3.00 +/- 0.01 3.74 +/- 0.01 24.7 % Detail : 1 CPU, replace smp lock prefixes with DS segment selector prefixes make -j1 kernel/ real 0m34.067s user 0m30.630s sys 0m2.980s real 0m33.867s user 0m30.582s sys 0m3.024s real 0m33.939s user 0m30.738s sys 0m2.876s real 0m33.913s user 0m30.806s sys 0m2.808s avg : 33.94s std. dev. : 0.07s hackbench 50 Time: 2.978 Time: 2.982 Time: 3.010 Time: 2.984 Time: 2.982 avg : 2.99 std. dev. : 0.01 1 CPU, noreplace-smp make -j1 kernel/ real 0m35.326s user 0m30.630s sys 0m3.260s real 0m34.325s user 0m30.802s sys 0m3.084s real 0m35.568s user 0m30.722s sys 0m3.168s real 0m34.435s user 0m30.886s sys 0m2.996s avg.: 34.91s std. dev. : 0.27s hackbench 50 Time: 3.733 Time: 3.750 Time: 3.761 Time: 3.737 Time: 3.741 avg : 3.74 std. dev. : 0.01 1 CPU, replace smp lock prefixes with 0x90 nops make -j1 kernel/ real 0m34.139s user 0m30.782s sys 0m2.820s real 0m34.010s user 0m30.630s sys 0m2.976s real 0m34.777s user 0m30.658s sys 0m2.916s real 0m33.924s user 0m30.634s sys 0m2.924s real 0m33.962s user 0m30.774s sys 0m2.800s real 0m34.141s user 0m30.770s sys 0m2.828s avg : 34.16 std. dev. : 0.32 hackbench 50 Time: 2.999 Time: 2.994 Time: 3.004 Time: 2.991 Time: 2.988 avg : 3.00 std. dev. : 0.01 I did more runs (20 runs of each) to compare the nop case to the DS prefix case. Results in seconds. They actually does not seems to show a significant difference. NOP 34.155 33.955 34.012 35.299 35.679 34.141 33.995 35.016 34.254 33.957 33.957 34.008 35.013 34.494 33.893 34.295 34.314 34.854 33.991 34.132 DS 34.080 34.304 34.374 35.095 34.291 34.135 33.940 34.208 35.276 34.288 33.861 33.898 34.610 34.709 33.851 34.256 35.161 34.283 33.865 35.078 Used http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/ttest1.cfm?Format=C to do the T-test (yeah, I'm lazy) : Group Group One (DS prefix) Group Two (nops) Mean 34.37815 34.37070 SD 0.46108 0.51905 SEM 0.10310 0.11606 N 20 20 P value and statistical significance: The two-tailed P value equals 0.9620 By conventional criteria, this difference is considered to be not statistically significant. Confidence interval: The mean of Group One minus Group Two equals 0.00745 95% confidence interval of this difference: From -0.30682 to 0.32172 Intermediate values used in calculations: t = 0.0480 df = 38 standard error of difference = 0.155 So, unless these calculus are completely bogus, the difference between the nop and the DS case seems not to be statistically significant. Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca> Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> CC: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> CC: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org> CC: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com> CC: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> CC: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com> CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> CC: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> CC: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> CC: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> CC: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> CC: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> CC: Gregory Haskins <ghaskins@novell.com> CC: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com> CC: "Luis Claudio R. Goncalves" <lclaudio@uudg.org> CC: Clark Williams <williams@redhat.com> CC: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org> CC: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> CC: Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c')
-rw-r--r--arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c8
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c b/arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c
index 2763cb37b553..7ead11f3732d 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c
@@ -241,25 +241,25 @@ static void alternatives_smp_lock(u8 **start, u8 **end, u8 *text, u8 *text_end)
241 continue; 241 continue;
242 if (*ptr > text_end) 242 if (*ptr > text_end)
243 continue; 243 continue;
244 text_poke(*ptr, ((unsigned char []){0xf0}), 1); /* add lock prefix */ 244 /* turn DS segment override prefix into lock prefix */
245 text_poke(*ptr, ((unsigned char []){0xf0}), 1);
245 }; 246 };
246} 247}
247 248
248static void alternatives_smp_unlock(u8 **start, u8 **end, u8 *text, u8 *text_end) 249static void alternatives_smp_unlock(u8 **start, u8 **end, u8 *text, u8 *text_end)
249{ 250{
250 u8 **ptr; 251 u8 **ptr;
251 char insn[1];
252 252
253 if (noreplace_smp) 253 if (noreplace_smp)
254 return; 254 return;
255 255
256 add_nops(insn, 1);
257 for (ptr = start; ptr < end; ptr++) { 256 for (ptr = start; ptr < end; ptr++) {
258 if (*ptr < text) 257 if (*ptr < text)
259 continue; 258 continue;
260 if (*ptr > text_end) 259 if (*ptr > text_end)
261 continue; 260 continue;
262 text_poke(*ptr, insn, 1); 261 /* turn lock prefix into DS segment override prefix */
262 text_poke(*ptr, ((unsigned char []){0x3E}), 1);
263 }; 263 };
264} 264}
265 265