Fix: urcu: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups
Observed issue
==============
The urcu wait_gp() implements a futex wait/wakeup scheme identical to
the workqueue code, which has an issue with spurious wakeups.
A spurious wakeup on wait_gp can cause wait_gp to return with a
rcu_gp.futex state of -1, which is unexpected. It would cause the
following loops in wait_for_readers() to decrement the
rcu_gp.futex to values below -1, thus actively using CPU as values
will be decremented to very low negative values until it reaches 0
through underflow, or until the input_readers list is found to be empty.
The state is restored to 0 when the input_readers list is found to be
empty, which restores the futex state to a correct state for the
following calls to wait_for_readers().
This issue will cause spurious unexpected high CPU use, but will not
lead to data corruption.
Cause
=====
From futex(5):
FUTEX_WAIT
Returns 0 if the caller was woken up. Note that a wake-up can
also be caused by common futex usage patterns in unrelated code
that happened to have previously used the futex word's memory
location (e.g., typical futex-based implementations of Pthreads
mutexes can cause this under some conditions). Therefore, call‐
ers should always conservatively assume that a return value of 0
can mean a spurious wake-up, and use the futex word's value
(i.e., the user-space synchronization scheme) to decide whether
to continue to block or not.
Solution
========
We therefore need to validate whether the value differs from -1 in
user-space after the call to FUTEX_WAIT returns 0.
Known drawbacks
===============
None.
Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Change-Id: I83942e24c32e77395ff25b466f1b1640422b9eb5
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