Re: BUG or not? GFP_KERNEL with interrupts disabled.

From: Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 12:22:29 EST


On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, David S. Miller wrote:
>
> Further more, holding a lock_irq doesn't mean bottom halves are disabled
> too, it just means interrupts are disabled and no *new* softirq can be
> queued. Consider the following situation:
>
> I think local_bh_enable() should check irqs_disabled() and honour that.
> What you are showing here, that BH's can run via local_bh_enable()
> even when IRQs are disabled, is a BUG().

I'd disagree.

I do agree that we should obviously not run bottom halves with interrupts
disabled, but I think the _real_ bug is doing "local_bh_enable()" in the
first place. It's a nesting bug: you must nest the "stronger" lock inside
the weaker one, which means that the following is right:

        local_bh_disable()
                ..
                local_irq_disable()
                ...
                local_irq_enable()
                ..
        local_bh_enable()

and this is WRONG:

        local_irq_disable() (or spinlock)
                ..
                local_bh_disable()
                ..
                local_bh_enable() !BUG BUG BUG!
                ..
        local_irq_enable()

So the bug is, in my opinion, not in BK handling, but in the caller.

I missed the start of this thread, so I don't know how hard this is to
fix. But if you have a buggy sequence, the _simple_ fix may be to do
somehting like this:

+++ local_bh_disable()
        local_irq_disable() (or spinlock)
                ..
                local_bh_disable()
                ..
                local_bh_enable() ! now it's a no-op and no longer a bug
                ..
        local_irq_enable()
+++ local_bh_enable()

What's the code sequence?

                Linus

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