Re: [PATCH v2] membarrier: provide register sync core cmd

[Will Deacon]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 03:05:46AM +0000, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> ----- On Aug 27, 2017, at 3:53 PM, Andy Lutomirski luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> >> On Aug 27, 2017, at 1:50 PM, Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >> wrote:
> >> 
> >> Add a new MEMBARRIER_CMD_REGISTER_SYNC_CORE command to the membarrier
> >> system call. It allows processes to register their intent to have their
> >> threads issue core serializing barriers in addition to memory barriers
> >> whenever a membarrier command is performed.
> >> 
> > 
> > Why is this stateful?  That is, why not just have a new membarrier command to
> > sync every thread's icache?
> 
> If we'd do it on every CPU icache, it would be as trivial as you say. The
> concern here is sending IPIs only to CPUs running threads that belong to the
> same process, so we don't disturb unrelated processes.
> 
> If we could just grab each CPU's runqueue lock, it would be fairly simple
> to do. But we want to avoid hitting each runqueue with exclusive atomic
> access associated with grabbing the lock. (cache-line bouncing)

I'm still trying to get my head around this for arm64, where we have the
following properties:

  * Return to userspace is context-synchronizing
  * We have a heavy barrier in switch_to

so it would seem to me that we could avoid taking RQ locks if the mm_cpumask
was kept up to date. The problematic case is where a CPU is not observed in
the mask (maybe the write is buffered), but it is running in userspace.
However, that can't occur with the barrier in switch_to.

So we only need to IPI those CPUs that were in userspace for this task
at the point when the syscall was made, and the mm_cpumask should reflect
that.

What am I missing?

Will