From: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2022 20:27:41 +0000 (-0400)
Subject: Fix: waiter: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups
X-Git-Url: https://git.lttng.org./?a=commitdiff_plain;h=6e5438dc2a03af904456e5d0ff2e29cade75b253;p=lttng-tools.git

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
---

diff --git a/src/common/waiter.cpp b/src/common/waiter.cpp
index 3ddb68feb..2a1dded89 100644
--- a/src/common/waiter.cpp
+++ b/src/common/waiter.cpp
@@ -49,15 +49,25 @@ void lttng_waiter_wait(struct lttng_waiter *waiter)
 		}
 		caa_cpu_relax();
 	}
-	while (futex_noasync(&waiter->state, FUTEX_WAIT, WAITER_WAITING,
-			NULL, NULL, 0)) {
+	while (uatomic_read(&waiter->state) == WAITER_WAITING) {
+		if (!futex_noasync(&waiter->state, FUTEX_WAIT, WAITER_WAITING, NULL, NULL, 0)) {
+			/*
+			 * Prior queued wakeups queued by unrelated code
+			 * using the same address can cause futex wait to
+			 * return 0 even through the futex value is still
+			 * WAITER_WAITING (spurious wakeups). Check
+			 * the value again in user-space to validate
+			 * whether it really differs from WAITER_WAITING.
+			 */
+			continue;
+		}
 		switch (errno) {
-		case EWOULDBLOCK:
+		case EAGAIN:
 			/* Value already changed. */
 			goto skip_futex_wait;
 		case EINTR:
 			/* Retry if interrupted by signal. */
-			break;	/* Get out of switch. */
+			break;	/* Get out of switch. Check again. */
 		default:
 			/* Unexpected error. */
 			PERROR("futex_noasync");