Re: futex: wakeup race and futex_q woken state definition

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Thu Sep 17 2009 - 11:24:15 EST


On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Darren Hart wrote:
> > /*
> > * !plist_node_empty() is safe here without any lock.
> > * q.lock_ptr != 0 is not safe, because of ordering against wakeup.
> > */
> > if (likely(!plist_node_empty(&q->list))) {
> >
> > If we move set_current_state() before the queue_me() this check is
> > still an optimization to avoid the schedule call in case we have been
> > woken up already. But the comment is still wrong as the wakeup code
> > has changed:
> >
> > The old version did:
> >
> > plist_del(&q->list);
> > wake_up_all(&q->waiters);
> > q->lock_ptr = NULL;
> >
> > Today we do:
> >
> > p = q->task;
> > get_task_struct(p);
> > plist_del(&q->list);
> > q->lock_ptr = NULL;
> > wake_up_state(p);
> > put_task_struct(p);
> >
> > We changed this because it makes no sense to use a waitqueue for a
> > single task.
>
> Right.
>
>
> However, my bigger concern still remains. If the above is only an
> optimization, we appear to have a race with wakeup where we can see a
> non-empty list here and decide to schedule and have the wakeup code remove us
> from the list, hiding it from all future futex related wakeups (signal and
> timeout would still work).

No.

Sleeper does:

set_current_state(TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE);

if (!plist_empty())
schedule();

So when the list removal happened before set_current_state() we don't
schedule. If the wakeup happens _after_ set_current_state() then the
wake_up_state() call will bring us back to running.

> We have also been seeing a race with the requeue_pi code with a JVM benchmark
> where the apparent owner of the pi mutex remains blocked on the condvar - this
> can be explained by the race I'm suspecting. Also, futex_requeue_pi() is
> using futex_wait_queue_me() which expects the waker to remove the futex_q from
> the list, which isn't how things work for PI mutexes. In an experiment, I
> moved the spin_unlock() out of queueme() and right before the call to
> schedule() to narrow the race window, and the hang we were experiencing
> appears to have gone away.

The correct thing to do is to move set_current_state() before queue_me().

Thanks,

tglx
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