Re: [RFC PATCH v1 06/22] PCI: use a global lock to serialize PCIroot bridge hotplug operations

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 10:51:05AM -0600, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Jiang Liu <liuj97@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On 09/12/2012 06:57 AM, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> >> On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Jiang Liu <liuj97@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>> Currently there's no mechanism to protect the global pci_root_buses list
> >>> from dynamic change at runtime. That means, PCI root bridge hotplug
> >>> operations, which dynamically change the pci_root_buses list, may cause
> >>> invalid memory accesses.
> >>>
> >>> So introduce a global lock to serialize accesses to the pci_root_buses
> >>> list and serialize PCI host bridge hotplug operations.
> 
> >>> @@ -463,6 +463,8 @@ static int __devinit acpi_pci_root_add(struct acpi_device *device)
> >>>         if (!root)
> >>>                 return -ENOMEM;
> >>>
> >>> +       pci_host_bridge_hotplug_lock();
> >>
> >> Here's where I get lost.  This is an ACPI driver's .add() routine,
> >> which is analogous to a PCI driver's .probe() routine.  PCI driver
> >> .probe() routines don't need to be concerned with PCI device hotplug.
> >> All the hotplug-related locking is handled by the PCI core, not by
> >> individual drivers.  So why do we need it here?
> >>
> >> I'm not suggesting that the existing locking is correct.  I'm just not
> >> convinced this is the right way to fix it.
> >>
> >> The commit log says we need protection for the global pci_root_buses
> >> list.  But even with this whole series, we still traverse the list
> >> without protection in places like pcibios_resource_survey() and
> >> pci_assign_unassigned_resources().
> >>
> >> Maybe we can make progress on this by identifying specific failures
> >> that can happen in a couple of these paths, e.g., acpi_pci_root_add()
> >> and i7core_xeon_pci_fixup().  If we look at those paths, we might a
> >> way to fix this in a more general fashion than throwing in lock/unlock
> >> pairs.
> >>
> >> It might also help to know what the rule is for when we need to use
> >> pci_host_bridge_hotplug_lock() and pci_host_bridge_hotplug_unlock().
> >> Apparently it is not as simple as protecting every reference to the
> >> pci_root_buses list.
> > Hi Bjorn,
> >         It's really a challenge work to protect the pci_root_buses list:)
> 
> Yes.  IIRC, your last patch was to unexport pci_root_buses, which I
> think is a great idea.
> 
> > All evils are caused by the pci_find_next_bus() interface, which is designed
> > to be called at boot time only. I have tried several other solutions but
> > failed.
> >         First I tried "pci_get_next_bus()" which holds a reference to the
> > returned root bus "pci_bus". But that doesn't help because pci_bus could
> > be removed from the pci_root_buses list even you hold a reference to
> > pci_bus. And it will cause trouble when you call pci_get_next_bus(pci_bus)
> > again because pci_bus->node.next is invalid now.
> 
> That sounds like a bug.  If an interface returns a structure after
> acquiring a reference, the caller should be able to rely on the
> structure remaining valid.  Adding extra locks doesn't feel like the
> right solution for that problem.
> 
> In the big picture, I'm not sure how much sense all the
> pci_find_bus(), pci_find_next_bus(), pci_get_bus(),
> pci_get_next_bus(), etc., interfaces really make.  There really aren't
> very many callers, and most of them look a bit hacky to me.  Usually
> they're quirks trying to locate a device or drivers for device A
> trying to locate companion device B or something similar.  I wonder if
> we could figure out some entirely new interface that wouldn't involve
> traversing so much of the hierarchy and therefore could be safer.
> 
> >         Then I tried RCU and also failed because caller of pci_get_next_bus()
> > may sleep.

On the unlikely off-chance that it helps, SRCU does allow sleeping
readers.

							Thanx, Paul

> >         And at last the global host bridge hotplug lock solution. The rules
> > for locking are:
> >         1) No need for locking when accessing the pci_root_buses list at
> > system initialization stages. (It's system initialization instead of driver
> > initialization here because driver's initialization code may be called
> > at runtime when loading the driver.) It's single-threaded and no hotplug
> > during system initialization stages.
> >         2) Should acquire the global lock when accessing the pci_root_buses
> > list at runtime.
> >
> >         I have done several rounds of scanning to identify accessing to
> > the pci_root_buses list at runtime. But there may still be something missed:(
> 
> That's part of what makes me uneasy.  We have to look at a lot of code
> outside drivers/pci to analyze correctness, which is difficult.  It
> would be much better if we could do something in the core, where we
> only have to analyze drivers/pci.  I know this is probably much harder
> and probably involves replacing or removing some of these interfaces
> that cause problems.
> 
> >         I think the best solution is to get rid of the pci_find_next_bus().
> > but not sure whether we could achieve that.
> 
> >> Actually, I looked at the callers of pci_find_next_bus(), and most of
> >> them are unsafe in an even deeper way: they're doing device setup in
> >> initcalls, so that setup won't be done for hot-added devices.  For
> >> example, I can pick on sba_init() because I think I wrote it back in
> >> the dark ages.  sba_init() is a subsys_initcall that calls
> >> sba_connect_bus() for every bus we know about at boot-time, and it
> >> sets the host bridge's iommu pointer.  If we were to hot-add a host
> >> bridge, we would never set the iommu pointer.
> 
> > That's a more fundamental issue, another big topic for us:(
> 
> >> I'm not sure why you didn't add a pci_host_bridge_hotplug_lock() in
> >> the sba_init() path, since it looks similar to the drm_open_helper()
> >> path above.  But in any case, I think that would be the wrong thing to
> >> do because it would fix the superficial problem while leaving the
> >> deeper problem of host bridge hot-add not setting the iommu pointer.
> 
> > sba_init is called during system initialization stages through subsys_initcall,
> > so no extra protection for it.
> 
> OK, I see your reasoning.  But I don't agree :)  All the users of an
> interface should use the same locking scheme, even if they're at
> boot-time where we "know" we don't need it.  It's too hard to analyze
> differences, and code gets copied from one place to somewhere else
> where it might not be appropriate.
> 
> Bjorn
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