Re: [PATCH v3 6/9] x86/smpboot: Support parallel startup of secondary CPUs

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2022-02-01 at 11:56 +0100, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 10:25:01AM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > Thanks. It looks like that is only invoked after boot, with a write to
> > /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload.
> > 
> > My series is only parallelising the initial bringup at boot time, so it
> > shouldn't make any difference.
> 
> No, I don't mean __reload_late() - I pointed you at that function to
> show the dance we must do when updating microcode late.
> 
> The load_ucode_{ap,bsp}() routines are what is called when loading ucode
> early.
> 
> So the question is, does the parallelizing change the order in which APs
> are brought up and can it happen that a SMT sibling of a two-SMT core
> executes *something* while the other SMT sibling is updating microcode.
> 
> If so, that would be bad.

Right. So as you surmise, I haven't broken that... yet. At least not in
the patches I've posted :)

The call to ucode_cpu_init() is in cpu_init(), right after the call to
wait_for_master_cpu(), which this AP's bit in cpu_initialized_mask and
then waits for the BSP to set its bit in cpu_callout_mask.

That's a full synchronization point with do_wait_cpu_initalized() on
the BSP, which waits for the former and then sets the later.

So... with the series I've posted, all APs end up waiting in
wait_for_master_cpu() until the final serialized bringup.

In the top of my git tree, you can see a half-baked 'parallel part 2'
commit which introduces a new x86/cpu:wait-init cpuhp state that would
invoke do_wait_cpu_initialized() for each CPU in turn, which *would*
release them all into load_ucode_bsp() at the same time and have
precisely the problem you're describing.

I'll commit a FIXME comment now so that it doesn't slip my mind.

Thanks.


> > However... it does look like there's nothing preventing a sibling being
> > brought online *while* the dance you mention above is occurring.
> 
> Bottom line is: of the two SMT siblings, one needs to be updating
> microcode while the other is idle. I.e., what __reload_late() does.
> 
> > Shouldn't __reload_late() take the device_hotplug_lock to prevent that?
> 
> See reload_store().

Hm, not sure I see how that's protecting itself from someone
simultaneously echoing 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu${SIBLING}/online

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