Re: [PATCH 2/6] __wr_after_init: write rare for static allocation

From: Igor Stoppa
Date: Sun Dec 09 2018 - 17:32:28 EST




On 06/12/2018 11:44, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 03:13:56PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

+ if (op == WR_MEMCPY)
+ memcpy((void *)wr_poking_addr, (void *)src, len);
+ else if (op == WR_MEMSET)
+ memset((u8 *)wr_poking_addr, (u8)src, len);
+ else if (op == WR_RCU_ASSIGN_PTR)
+ /* generic version of rcu_assign_pointer */
+ smp_store_release((void **)wr_poking_addr,
+ RCU_INITIALIZER((void **)src));
+ kasan_enable_current();

Hmm. I suspect this will explode quite badly on sane architectures
like s390. (In my book, despite how weird s390 is, it has a vastly
nicer model of "user" memory than any other architecture I know
of...). I think you should use copy_to_user(), etc, instead. I'm not
entirely sure what the best smp_store_release() replacement is.
Making this change may also mean you can get rid of the
kasan_disable_current().

If you make the MEMCPY one guarantee single-copy atomicity for native
words then you're basically done.

smp_store_release() can be implemented with:

smp_mb();
WRITE_ONCE();

So if we make MEMCPY provide the WRITE_ONCE(), all we need is that
barrier, which we can easily place at the call site and not overly
complicate our interface with this.

Ok, so the 3rd case (WR_RCU_ASSIGN_PTR) could be handled outside of this function.
But, since now memcpy() will be replaced by copy_to_user(), can I assume that also copy_to_user() will be atomic, if the destination is properly aligned? On x86_64 it seems yes, however it's not clear to me if this is the outcome of an optimization or if I can expect it to be always true.


--
igor