Re: [GIT PULL] Please pull proc and exec work for 5.7-rc1

[Bernd Edlinger]

On 4/4/20 4:28 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 7:02 PM Waiman Long <longman@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> So in term of priority, my current thinking is
>>
>>     upgrading unfair reader > unfair reader > reader/writer
>>
>> A higher priority locker will block other lockers from acquiring the lock.
> 
> An alternative option might be to have readers normally be 100% normal
> (ie with fairness wrt writers), and not really introduce any special
> "unfair reader" lock.
> 
> Instead, all the unfairness would come into play only when the special
> case - execve() - does it's special "lock for reading with intent to
> upgrade".
> 
> But when it enters that kind of "intent to upgrade" lock state, it
> would not only block all subsequent writers, it would also guarantee
> that all other readers can continue to go).
> 
> So then the new rwsem operations would be
> 
>  - read_with_write_intent_lock_interruptible()
> 
>    This is the beginning of "execve()", and waits for all writers to
> exit, and puts the lock into "all readers can go" mode.
> 
>    You could think of it as a "I'm queuing myself for a write lock,
> but I'm allowing readers to go ahead" state.
> 
>  - read_lock_to_write_upgrade()
> 
>    This is the "now this turns into a regular write lock". It needs to
> wait for all other readers to exit, of course.
> 
>  - read_with_write_intent_unlock()
> 
>    This is the "I'm unqueuing myself, I aborted and will not become a
> write lock after all" operation.
> 
> NOTE! In this model, there may be multiple threads that do that
> initial queuing thing. We only guarantee that only one of them will
> get to the actual write lock stage, and the others will abort before
> that happens.

One of the problems that add to the current situation, is that sometimes
the cred_guard_mutex is locked killable, so can be killed by de_thread.
But in other places cred_guard_mutex is not killable. So cannot be
locked and cannot be killed either -> dead-lock.


But Fear Not!

Overall we are pretty much in a good position to defeat the
enemy now, once an forever.

- We have my ugly-crazy patch that just works.

- We will have Eric's patch that is even better.

- We can try to put something togeter with creative new rw-type semaphores.

- We can merge ideas from one of the patches to another.


So it is impossible we not succeed to fix it this time :-)


Bernd.

> 
> If that is a more natural state machine, then that should work fine
> too. And it has some advantages, in that it keeps the readers normally
> fair, and only turns them unfair when we get to that special
> read-for-write stage.
> 
> But whatever it most natural for the rwsem code. Entirely up to you.
> 
>                Linus
>