[RFC/PATCH] mm/futex: Fix futex writes on archs with SW tracking of dirty & young

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:52:06 +1000
Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-07-21 at 15:36 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:29:22 +1000
> > Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > The futex code currently attempts to write to user memory within
> > > a pagefault disabled section, and if that fails, tries to fix it
> > > up using get_user_pages().
> > > 
> > > This doesn't work on archs where the dirty and young bits are
> > > maintained by software, since they will gate access permission
> > > in the TLB, and will not be updated by gup().
> > > 
> > > In addition, there's an expectation on some archs that a
> > > spurious write fault triggers a local TLB flush, and that is
> > > missing from the picture as well.
> > > 
> > > I decided that adding those "features" to gup() would be too much
> > > for this already too complex function, and instead added a new
> > > simpler fixup_user_fault() which is essentially a wrapper around
> > > handle_mm_fault() which the futex code can call.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org>
> > > ---
> > > 
> > > Shan, can you test this ? It might not fix the problem
> > 
> > um, what problem.  There's no description here of the user-visible
> > effects of the bug hence it's hard to work out what kernel version(s)
> > should receive this patch.
> 
> Shan could give you an actual example (it was in the previous thread),
> but basically, livelock as the kernel keeps trying and trying the
> in_atomic op and never resolves it.
>  
> > What kernel version(s) should receive this patch?
> 
> I haven't dug. Probably anything it applies on as far as we did that
> trick of atomic + gup() for futex.

You're not understanding me.

I need a good reason to merge this into 3.0.

The -stable maintainers need even better reasons to merge this into
earlier kernels.

Please provide those reasons!

(Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt, 4th bullet)

(And it's not just me and -stable maintainers.  Distro maintainers will
also look at this patch and wonder whether they should merge it)