Re: Rough notes from sys_membarrier() lightning BoF

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 06:13:50PM +0000, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> My proposed RFC for private expedited membarrier enforces that all
> architectures perform the registration step. Using the "PRIVATE_EXPEDITED"
> command without prior process registration returns an error on all
> architectures. The goal here is to make all architectures behave in the
> same way, and it allows us to rely on process registration to deal
> with future arch-specific optimizations.
> 
> Adding the "core_sync" behavior could then be done for the next kernel
> merge window. I'm currently foreseeing two possible ABI approaches to
> expose it:
> 
> Approach 1:
> 
> Add MEMBARRIER_CMD_PRIVATE_EXPEDITED_SYNC_CORE and
> MEMBARRIER_CMD_REGISTER_PRIVATE_EXPEDITED_SYNC_CORE commands. This
> allows us to return their availability through MEMBARRIER_CMD_QUERY.
> 
> Approach 2:
> 
> Add a "MEMBARRIER_FLAG_SYNC_CORE" as flag parameter. It could be set
> when issuing both MEMBARRIER_CMD_REGISTER_PRIVATE_EXPEDITED and
> MEMBARRIER_CMD_PRIVATE_EXPEDITED, thus ensuring core serializing
> behavior. Querying whether core serialization is supported could
> be done by issuing the MEMBARRIER_CMD_QUERY command with the
> MEMBARRIER_FLAG_SYNC_CORE flag set.
> 
> Any other ideas ? Any approach seems better ?

So we really need another FLAG for that? AFAICT the current
PRIVATE_EXPEDITED is already sufficient for the cross modifying code,
since the IPI triggers an exception return on all currently running CPUs
and the future running CPUs will have the return to userspace doing the
exception return.

The only issue is Andy fudging our x86 ret-to-userspace to not use IRET,
which we can fix by forcing it into the slowpath (that needs to exist
anyway) using that new TIF flag.