Re: [PATCH 2/2] arm64: bpf: add BPF XADD instruction

[Will Deacon]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for investigating this further.

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 04:52:00PM +0100, Daniel Borkmann wrote:
> I played a bit around with eBPF code to assign the __sync_fetch_and_add()
> return value to a var and dump it to trace pipe, or use it as return code.
> llvm compiles it (with the result assignment) and it looks like:
> 
> [...]
> 206: (b7) r3 = 3
> 207: (db) lock *(u64 *)(r0 +0) += r3
> 208: (bf) r1 = r10
> 209: (07) r1 += -16
> 210: (b7) r2 = 10
> 211: (85) call 6 // r3 dumped here
> [...]
> 
> [...]
> 206: (b7) r5 = 3
> 207: (db) lock *(u64 *)(r0 +0) += r5
> 208: (bf) r1 = r10
> 209: (07) r1 += -16
> 210: (b7) r2 = 10
> 211: (b7) r3 = 43
> 212: (b7) r4 = 42
> 213: (85) call 6 // r5 dumped here
> [...]
> 
> [...]
> 11: (b7) r0 = 3
> 12: (db) lock *(u64 *)(r1 +0) += r0
> 13: (95) exit // r0 returned here
> [...]
> 
> What it seems is that we 'get back' the value (== 3 here in r3, r5, r0)
> that we're adding, at least that's what seems to be generated wrt
> register assignments. Hmm, the semantic differences of bpf target
> should be documented somewhere for people writing eBPF programs to
> be aware of.

If we're going to document it, a bug tracker might be a good place to
start. The behaviour, as it stands, is broken wrt the definition of the
__sync primitives. That is, there is no way to build __sync_fetch_and_add
out of BPF_XADD without changing its semantics.

We could fix this by either:

(1) Defining BPF_XADD to match __sync_fetch_and_add (including memory
    barriers).

(2) Introducing some new BPF_ atomics, that map to something like the
    C11 __atomic builtins and deprecating BPF_XADD in favour of these.

(3) Introducing new source-language intrinsics to match what BPF can do
    (unlikely to be popular).

As it stands, I'm not especially keen on adding BPF_XADD to the arm64
JIT backend until we have at least (1) and preferably (2) as well.

Will
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