Re: [PATCH 1/2] powerpc: Allow perf_counters to access user memoryat interrupt time

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Date: Thu Jul 23 2009 - 02:38:54 EST


On Sat, 2009-06-27 at 15:30 +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> This provides a mechanism to allow the perf_counters code to access
> user memory in a PMU interrupt routine on a 64-bit kernel. Such an
> access can cause a SLB miss interrupt and/or a MMU hash table miss
> interrupt.
>
> An SLB miss interrupt on a user address will update the slb_cache and
> slb_cache_ptr fields in the paca. This is OK except in the case where
> a PMU interrupt occurs in switch_slb, which also accesses those fields.
> To prevent this, we hard-disable interrupts in switch_slb. Interrupts
> are already soft-disabled in switch-slb, and will get hard-enabled
> when they get soft-enabled later.

So while looking at this, I noticed that we only clear
paca->slb_cache_ptr in switch_slb(), which means that we don't clear it
whenever we call slb_flush_and_rebolt() for any other reason (such as
segment demotion, etc...). Not a huge deal, but probably a small perf
tweak to fix it.

Now there is another little concern here, is what happens if you take
your interrupt at the wrong time in the context switch code ? IE, if
switch_mm has already changed the context.id for example, but "current"
is still the previous task, you'll get a disconnect between the memory
you see which is the new task and what you think the task actually is.

I don't think there's any other problem with SLBs, ie, your
hard_irq_disable() in switch_slb() will also take care of ensuring that
paca->context is updated atomically vs. interrupts, thus the hash code
will see a consistent slice map etc... so that's ok.

But what about STAB ? We may not have perfmon interrupt support for
these but maybe one day ? :-)

> If a MMU hashtable miss interrupt occurs, normally we would call
> hash_page to look up the Linux PTE for the address and create a HPTE.
> However, hash_page is fairly complex and takes some locks, so to
> avoid the possibility of deadlock, we add a flag to the paca to
> indicate to the MMU hashtable miss handler that it should not call
> hash_page but instead treat it like a bad access that will get
> reported up through the exception table mechanism. The PMU interrupt
> code should then set this flag (get_paca()->in_pmu_nmi)

I would prefer a more generic name, such as "disable_hashing" or
something like that, after all, we may use that for other things
in the future...

> and use
> __get_user_inatomic to read user memory. If there is no HPTE for
> the address, __get_user_inatomic will return -EFAULT.
>
> On a 32-bit processor, there is no SLB. The 32-bit hash_page appears
> to be safe to call in an interrupt handler since we don't do soft
> disabling of interrupts on 32-bit, and the only lock that hash_page
> takes is the mmu_hash_lock, which is always taken with interrupts
> hard-disabled.

This is going to be broken for 32-bit hash with 64-bit PTEs in UP
mode :-) On those, we don't do set_pte atomically and we don't enforce
any ordering between the two halves, though I suppose we could lift that
"optimization". (See our pgtable.h, in __set_pte_at, we could remove the
defined(CONFIG_SMP) part of that statement).

The same problem is true to SW loaded TLB processors if they use 64-bit
PTEs though the same fix should hopefully apply. I don't know whether
that would be a significant performance degradation or not.

So the patch per-se is fine (minus maybe the name of the PACA variable)
but I believe it's insufficient.

Cheers,
Ben.

> Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> arch/powerpc/include/asm/paca.h | 3 ++-
> arch/powerpc/kernel/asm-offsets.c | 2 ++
> arch/powerpc/kernel/exceptions-64s.S | 21 +++++++++++++++++++++
> arch/powerpc/mm/slb.c | 10 +++++++++-
> 4 files changed, 34 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/paca.h b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/paca.h
> index c8a3cbf..17b29b1 100644
> --- a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/paca.h
> +++ b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/paca.h
> @@ -105,7 +105,8 @@ struct paca_struct {
> u8 soft_enabled; /* irq soft-enable flag */
> u8 hard_enabled; /* set if irqs are enabled in MSR */
> u8 io_sync; /* writel() needs spin_unlock sync */
> - u8 perf_counter_pending; /* PM interrupt while soft-disabled */
> + u8 perf_counter_pending; /* perf_counter stuff needs wakeup */
> + u8 in_pmu_nmi; /* PM interrupt while soft-disabled */
>
> /* Stuff for accurate time accounting */
> u64 user_time; /* accumulated usermode TB ticks */
> diff --git a/arch/powerpc/kernel/asm-offsets.c b/arch/powerpc/kernel/asm-offsets.c
> index 561b646..5347780 100644
> --- a/arch/powerpc/kernel/asm-offsets.c
> +++ b/arch/powerpc/kernel/asm-offsets.c
> @@ -130,6 +130,7 @@ int main(void)
> DEFINE(PACASOFTIRQEN, offsetof(struct paca_struct, soft_enabled));
> DEFINE(PACAHARDIRQEN, offsetof(struct paca_struct, hard_enabled));
> DEFINE(PACAPERFPEND, offsetof(struct paca_struct, perf_counter_pending));
> + DEFINE(PACAPERFNMI, offsetof(struct paca_struct, in_pmu_nmi));
> DEFINE(PACACONTEXTID, offsetof(struct paca_struct, context.id));
> #ifdef CONFIG_PPC_MM_SLICES
> DEFINE(PACALOWSLICESPSIZE, offsetof(struct paca_struct,
> @@ -398,6 +399,7 @@ int main(void)
> DEFINE(VCPU_TIMING_LAST_ENTER_TBL, offsetof(struct kvm_vcpu,
> arch.timing_last_enter.tv32.tbl));
> #endif
> + DEFINE(SIGSEGV, SIGSEGV);
>
> return 0;
> }
> diff --git a/arch/powerpc/kernel/exceptions-64s.S b/arch/powerpc/kernel/exceptions-64s.S
> index eb89811..02d96b0 100644
> --- a/arch/powerpc/kernel/exceptions-64s.S
> +++ b/arch/powerpc/kernel/exceptions-64s.S
> @@ -722,6 +722,12 @@ _STATIC(do_hash_page)
> std r3,_DAR(r1)
> std r4,_DSISR(r1)
>
> +#ifdef CONFIG_PERF_COUNTERS
> + lbz r0,PACAPERFNMI(r13)
> + cmpwi r0,0
> + bne 77f /* if we don't want to hash_page now */
> +#endif /* CONFIG_PERF_COUNTERS */
> +
> andis. r0,r4,0xa450 /* weird error? */
> bne- handle_page_fault /* if not, try to insert a HPTE */
> BEGIN_FTR_SECTION
> @@ -833,6 +839,21 @@ handle_page_fault:
> bl .low_hash_fault
> b .ret_from_except
>
> +#ifdef CONFIG_PERF_COUNTERS
> +/*
> + * We come here as a result of a DSI when accessing memory (possibly
> + * user memory) inside a PMU interrupt that occurred while interrupts
> + * were soft-disabled, so we just want to invoke the exception handler
> + * for the access, or panic if there isn't a handler.
> + */
> +77: bl .save_nvgprs
> + mr r4,r3
> + addi r3,r1,STACK_FRAME_OVERHEAD
> + li r5,SIGSEGV
> + bl .bad_page_fault
> + b .ret_from_except
> +#endif
> +
> /* here we have a segment miss */
> do_ste_alloc:
> bl .ste_allocate /* try to insert stab entry */
> diff --git a/arch/powerpc/mm/slb.c b/arch/powerpc/mm/slb.c
> index 3b52c80..ebfb8df 100644
> --- a/arch/powerpc/mm/slb.c
> +++ b/arch/powerpc/mm/slb.c
> @@ -187,12 +187,20 @@ static inline int esids_match(unsigned long addr1, unsigned long addr2)
> /* Flush all user entries from the segment table of the current processor. */
> void switch_slb(struct task_struct *tsk, struct mm_struct *mm)
> {
> - unsigned long offset = get_paca()->slb_cache_ptr;
> + unsigned long offset;
> unsigned long slbie_data = 0;
> unsigned long pc = KSTK_EIP(tsk);
> unsigned long stack = KSTK_ESP(tsk);
> unsigned long unmapped_base;
>
> + /*
> + * We need interrupts hard-disabled here, not just soft-disabled,
> + * so that a PMU interrupt can't occur, which might try to access
> + * user memory (to get a stack trace) and possible cause an SLB miss
> + * which would update the slb_cache/slb_cache_ptr fields in the PACA.
> + */
> + hard_irq_disable();
> + offset = get_paca()->slb_cache_ptr;
> if (!cpu_has_feature(CPU_FTR_NO_SLBIE_B) &&
> offset <= SLB_CACHE_ENTRIES) {
> int i;

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