Re: [PATCH 3/3] context_tracking,x86: remove extraneous irq disable & enable from context tracking on syscall entry

[Andy Lutomirski]

On May 7, 2015 4:18 PM, "Ingo Molnar" <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> * Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > > If, on the other hand, you're just going to remotely sample the
> > > in-memory context, that sounds good.
> >
> > It's the latter.
> >
> > If you look at /proc/<pid>/{stack,syscall,wchan} and other files,
> > you will see we already have ways to determine, from in memory
> > content, where a program is running at a certain point in time.
> >
> > In fact, the timer interrupt based accounting does a similar thing.
> > It has a task examine its own in-memory state to figure out what it
> > was doing before the timer interrupt happened.
> >
> > The kernel side stack pointer is probably enough to tell us whether
> > a task is active in kernel space, on an irq stack, or (maybe) in
> > user space. Not convinced about the latter, we may need to look at
> > the same state the RCU code keeps track of to see what mode a task
> > is in...
> >
> > I am looking at the code to see what locks we need to grab.
> >
> > I suspect the runqueue lock may be enough, to ensure that the task
> > struct, and stack do not go away while we are looking at them.
>
> That will be enough, especially if you get to the task reference via
> rq->curr.
>
> > We cannot take the lock_trace(task) from irq context, and we
> > probably do not need to anyway, since we do not care about a precise
> > stack trace for the task.
>
> So one worry with this and similar approaches of statistically
> detecting user mode would be the fact that on the way out to
> user-space we don't really destroy the previous call trace - we just
> pop off the stack (non-destructively), restore RIPs and are gone.
>
> We'll need that percpu flag I suspect.
>
> And once we have the flag, we can get rid of the per syscall RCU
> callback as well, relatively easily: with CMPXCHG (in
> synchronize_rcu()!) we can reliably sample whether a CPU is in user
> mode right now, while the syscall entry/exit path does not use any
> atomics, we can just use a simple MOV.
>
> Once we observe 'user mode', then we have observed quiescent state and
> synchronize_rcu() can continue. If we've observed kernel mode we can
> frob the remote task's TIF_ flags to make it go into a quiescent state
> publishing routine on syscall-return.
>

How does that work?

If the exit code writes the per-cpu flag and then checks TIF_whatever,
we need a barrier to avoid a race where we end up in user mode without
seeing the flag.

I think the right solution is to accept that race and just have the
RCU code send an IPI (or check again) if it sees too long of a period
elapse in kernel mode.

I think the flag should be a counter, though.  That way a workload
that makes lots of syscalls will be quickly detected as going through
quiescent states even if it's never actually observed in user mode.

> The only hard requirement of this scheme from the RCU synchronization
> POV is that all kernel contexts that may touch RCU state need to flip
> this flag reliably to 'kernel mode': i.e. all irq handlers, traps,
> NMIs and all syscall variants need to do this.
>
> But once it's there, it's really neat.
>

We already have to do this with the current code.  I went through and
checked all of the IST entries a couple versions ago.

I think we need to clean up the current garbage asm first, though.  See:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/luto/linux.git/commit/?h=x86/entry&id=d22f1dca4c7c93fdd1ce754e38d71d1961c0f9ac

(Very much unfinished, and it should probably be split up, but AFAICT
it works.  Don't hold your breath for a real version.)

--Andy

> Thanks,
>
>         Ingo
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