Re: Current mainline git (24e700e291d52bd2) hangs when building e.g. perf

[Andy Lutomirski]

> On Sep 8, 2017, at 6:05 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 5:00 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>> I'm not convinced.  The SDM says (Vol 3, 11.3, under WC):
>> 
>> If the WC buffer is partially filled, the writes may be delayed until
>> the next occurrence of a serializing event; such as, an SFENCE or
>> MFENCE instruction, CPUID execution, a read or write to uncached
>> memory, an interrupt occurrence, or a LOCK instruction execution.
>> 
>> Thanks, Intel, for definiing "serializing event" differently here than
>> anywhere else in the whole manual.
> 
> Yeah, it's really badly defined. Ok, maybe a locked instruction does
> actually wait for it.. It should be invisible to anything, regardless.
> 
>> 1. The kernel wants to reclaim a page of normal memory, so it unmaps
>> it and flushes.  Another CPU has an entry for that page in its WC
>> buffer.  I don't think we care whether the flush causes the WC write
>> to really hit RAM because it's unobservable -- we just need to make
>> sure it is ordered, as seen by software, before the flush operation
>> completes.  From the quote above, I think we're okay here.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
>> 2. The kernel is unmapping some IO memory (e.g. a GPU command buffer).
>> It wants a guarantee that, when flush_tlb_mm_range returns, all CPUs
>> are really done writing to it.  Here I'm less convinced.  The SDM
>> quote certainly suggests to me that we have a promise that the WC
>> write has *started* before flush_tlb_mm_range returns, but I'm not
>> sure I believe that it's guaranteed to have retired.
> 
> If others have writable TLB entries, what keeps them from just
> continuing to write for a long time afterwards?

Whoever unmaps the resource by kicking out their drm fd?  I admit I'm just trying to think of the worst case.

> 
>> I'd prefer to leave it as is except on the buggy AMD CPUs, though,
>> since the current code is nice and fast.
> 
> So is there a patch to detect the 383 erratum and serialize for those?
> I may have missed that part.
> 

The patch is in my head.  It's imaginarily attached to this email.


>              Linus