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

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/10/2013 09:07, Keir Fraser wrote:
> 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 :)

This is an orthogonal issue which could do with fixing.  Do note that
simply making changes to vcpu_schedule_lock() to return the appropriate
lock is not sufficient to fix this issue, as the race with changing
v->processor can cause two cpus to "successfully" lock the vcpu schedule
lock for a particular vcpu.

~Andrew

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