Re: [RFC PATCH] x86, entry: Switch stacks on a paranoid entry from userspace

From: Andy Lutomirski
Date: Thu Nov 13 2014 - 17:23:50 EST


On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Luck, Tony <tony.luck@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> printk seems to work just fine in do_machine_check. Any chance you
>> can instrument, for each cpu, all entries to do_machine_check, all
>> calls to do_machine_check, all returns, and everything that tries to
>> do memory_failure?
>
> I first added a printk() just for the cpu that calls do_machine_check()
>
> printk("MCE: regs = %p\n", regs);
>
> to see if something went wonky when jumping to the kernel stack.
> But that printed the same value every time (same process is consuming
> and recovering from errors). Maybe this took longer to hit the problem
> case - I ran to 1500ish errors instead of just 400 in the previous two tests.
> But not sure if that is a significant change.
>
> Then I added printk() for every entry/return on all cpus. This just locked
> up on the third injection. Serial console looked to have stopped printing
> after the first - so I put in bigger delays into my test program between injection
> and consumption, and before looping around for the next cycle to give
> time for all the messages (4-socket HSW-EX ... there are a lot of cpus
> printing messages). But now it is taking a lot longer to get through
> injection/consumption iterations. At 226 now and counting.
>
>> Also, shouldn't there be a local_irq_enable before memory_failure and
>> a local_irq_disable after it? It wouldn't surprise me if you've
>> deadlocked somewhere. Lockdep could also have something interesting
>> to say.
> Added enable/disable.
>
>> should still be deliverable. Is it possible that we really need an
>> IRET to unmask NMIs? This seems unlikely.)
>
> If that were the problem, wouldn't we fail on iteration 2, instead of
> 400+ ?
>
> -Tony

There could be a timer interrupt or something. But I agree, it seems
implausible.

Are you sure that this works in an unmodified kernel? The timeout
code seems highly questionable to me. For example, there's this:

if ((c->x86 > 6 || (c->x86 == 6 && c->x86_model >= 0xe)) &&
cfg->monarch_timeout < 0)
cfg->monarch_timeout = USEC_PER_SEC;

which presumably determines monarch_timeout on your system and sets it
to 1000000. But then there's this:

#define SPINUNIT 100 /* 100ns */

which smells like unit error to me. On top of that, it seems likely
to me that the cpu could execute a loop iteration in much less than
100ns, since the only thing that should be anything other than an L1
hit or a correctly predicted branch is the rmb(), which is lfence,
which is probably just a few ns. So you have 10k iterations at, say,
10ns each, allowing about 100Âs to synchronize, and if an SMI hits at
an inopportune time, boom.

Also, rmb, seriously? I would understand smp_rmb() or cpu_relax() or
even barrier(), but rmb() seems completely bogus if harmless.

--Andy

--
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC
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