This patch addresses a very sporadic pi-futex related failure in
highly threaded java apps on large SMP systems.
David Holmes reported that the pi_state consistency check in
lookup_pi_state triggered with his test application. This means that
the kernel internal pi_state and the user space futex variable are out
of sync. First we assumed that this is a user space data corruption,
but deeper investigation revieled that the problem happend because the
pi-futex code is not handling a fault in the futex_lock_pi path when
the user space variable needs to be fixed up.
The fault happens when a fork mapped the anon memory which contains
the futex readonly for COW or the page got swapped out exactly between
the unlock of the futex and the return of either the new futex owner
or the task which was the expected owner but failed to acquire the
kernel internal rtmutex. The current futex_lock_pi() code drops out
with an inconsistent in case it faults and returns -EFAULT to user
space. User space has no way to fixup that state.
When we wrote this code we thought that we could not drop the hash
bucket lock at this point to handle the fault.
After analysing the code again it turned out to be wrong because there
are only two tasks involved which might modify the pi_state and the
user space variable:
- the task which acquired the rtmutex
- the pending owner of the pi_state which did not get the rtmutex
Both tasks drop into the fixup_pi_state() function before returning to
user space. The first task which acquired the hash bucket lock faults
in the fixup of the user space variable, drops the spinlock and calls
futex_handle_fault() to fault in the page. Now the second task could
acquire the hash bucket lock and tries to fixup the user space
variable as well. It either faults as well or it succeeds because the
first task already faulted the page in.
One caveat is to avoid a double fixup. After returning from the fault
handling we reacquire the hash bucket lock and check whether the
pi_state owner has been modified already.
Reported-by: David Holmes <david.holmes@sun.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: David Holmes <david.holmes@sun.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
kernel/futex.c | 93 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
1 file changed, 73 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-)
1b7558e457