Patchwork powerpc: Feature nop out reservation clear when stcx checks address

The POWER architecture does not require stcx to check that it is operating
on the same address as the larx. This means it is possible for an
an exception handler to execute a larx, get a reservation, decide
not to do the stcx and then return back with an active reservation. If the
interrupted code was in the middle of a larx/stcx sequence the stcx could
incorrectly succeed.

All recent POWER CPUs check the address before letting the stcx succeed
so we can create a CPU feature and nop it out. As Ben suggested, we can
only do this in our syscall path because there is a remote possibility
some kernel code gets interrupted by an exception that ends up operating
on the same cacheline.

Thanks to Paul Mackerras and Derek Williams for the idea.

To test this I used a very simple null syscall (actually getppid) testcase
at http://ozlabs.org/~anton/junkcode/null_syscall.c

I tested against 2.6.35-git10 with the following changes against the
pseries_defconfig:

CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING=n
CONFIG_AUDIT=n
CONFIG_PPC_4K_PAGES=n
CONFIG_PPC_64K_PAGES=y
CONFIG_FORCE_MAX_ZONEORDER=9
CONFIG_PPC_SUBPAGE_PROT=n
CONFIG_FUNCTION_TRACER=n
CONFIG_FUNCTION_GRAPH_TRACER=n
CONFIG_IRQSOFF_TRACER=n
CONFIG_STACK_TRACER=n

to remove the overhead of virtual CPU accounting, syscall auditing and
the ftrace mcount tracers. 64kB pages were enabled to minimise TLB misses.

POWER6: +8.2%
POWER7: +7.0%

Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
---

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 03:20:05PM +1000, Anton Blanchard wrote:

> All recent POWER CPUs check the address before letting the stcx succeed
> so we can create a CPU feature and nop it out. As Ben suggested, we can
> only do this in our syscall path because there is a remote possibility
> some kernel code gets interrupted by an exception that ends up operating
> on the same cacheline.

Nice...  Just one nit, and that is that I think we now need a dummy
stcx in the context switch code so there is no possibility of getting
from one user context to another with a reservation still pending from
the first context.  I guess our chances of getting through schedule()
without doing any atomics, bitops or spinlocks are pretty remote, but
nevertheless it might be as well to make sure.

Paul.

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 16:41 +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 03:20:05PM +1000, Anton Blanchard wrote:
> 
> > All recent POWER CPUs check the address before letting the stcx succeed
> > so we can create a CPU feature and nop it out. As Ben suggested, we can
> > only do this in our syscall path because there is a remote possibility
> > some kernel code gets interrupted by an exception that ends up operating
> > on the same cacheline.
> 
> Nice...  Just one nit, and that is that I think we now need a dummy
> stcx in the context switch code so there is no possibility of getting
> from one user context to another with a reservation still pending from
> the first context.  I guess our chances of getting through schedule()
> without doing any atomics, bitops or spinlocks are pretty remote, but
> nevertheless it might be as well to make sure.

Do we care ? IE. If we define that the moment you have done a syscall,
the reservation state is undefined, we are clear here, don't you think ?

Cheers,
Ben.