Fix: waiter: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups
authorMathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 20:27:41 +0000 (16:27 -0400)
committerJérémie Galarneau <jeremie.galarneau@efficios.com>
Mon, 22 Aug 2022 17:27:34 +0000 (13:27 -0400)
commit6e5438dc2a03af904456e5d0ff2e29cade75b253
tree89e9903538d1cac18c6eaf14f232d491640a0bec
parent36962e16797b5ca590c54a385ca594e2859ef8c2
Fix: waiter: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups

Observed issue
==============

The waiter lttng_waiter_wait() implements a futex wait/wakeup
scheme similar to the liburcu workqueue code, which has an issue with
spurious wakeups.

A spurious wakeup on lttng_waiter_wait can cause
lttng_waiter_wait to reach label skip_futex_wait with a
waiter->state state of WAITER_WAITING, which is unexpected. It would
cause busy-waiting on WAITER_TEARDOWN state to start early. The
wait-teardown stage is done with WAIT_ATTEMPTS active attempts,
following by attempts spaced by 10ms sleeps. I do not expect that these
spurious wakeups will cause user-observable effects other than being
slightly less efficient that it should be.

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
WAITER_WAITING in user-space after the call to FUTEX_WAIT returns 0.

Known drawbacks
===============

None.

Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Signed-off-by: Jérémie Galarneau <jeremie.galarneau@efficios.com>
Change-Id: Ida9905d1f0b5d9543c8b85ecbd7d748a6f7c1c97
src/common/waiter.cpp
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