Fix: call_rcu: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups
Observed issue
==============
The urcu call_rcu() and rcu_barrier() each implement a futex wait/wakeup
scheme identical to the workqueue code, which has an issue with spurious
wakeups.
* call_rcu
A spurious wakeup on call_rcu_wait can cause call_rcu_wait to return
with a crdp->futex state of -1, which is unexpected. It would cause the
following loops in call_rcu_thread() to decrement the crdp->futex to
values below -1, thus actively using CPU time as values will be
decremented to very low negative values until the futex value underflows
back to 0. The state is *not* restored to 0 when the callback list is
found to be non-empty, so this unexpected state will persist until the
crdp->futex state underflows back to 0, or until the call_rcu_thread is
stopped. What prevents this from having too much user-observable effects
is that the call rcu thread has a 10ms sleep between loops, to favor
batching of callbacks. Therefore, rather than being a purely 100% active
busy-wait, this scenario leads to a busy-wait which is paced by 10ms
sleeps.
Therefore the observed issue will be that the call_rcu_thread will
unexpectedly wake up the CPU each 10ms after this spurious wakeup
happens.
* rcu_barrier
A spurious wakeup on call_rcu_completion_wait can cause
call_rcu_completion_wait to return with a completion->futex state of -1,
which is unexpected. It would cause the following loops in rcu_barrier()
to decrement the completion->futex to values below -1, thus actively
using CPU time as values will be decremented to very low negative values
until either the barrier count reaches 0 or until the futex value
underflows to 0.
Therefore the observed issue will be that rcu_barrier() will
unexpectedly use a lot of CPU time when this spurious wakeup happens.
These issues 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: I3e625f1689462f8eb9f1223b5b24b1a754bad324
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