Re: [PATCH] clk: Fix children not voting entire parent chain during init

From: Mike Tipton
Date: Tue Dec 07 2021 - 23:21:35 EST


On 12/7/2021 5:53 PM, Stephen Boyd wrote:
Quoting Mike Tipton (2021-11-08 20:34:38)
If a child's parent is set by calling __clk_init_parent() while the
parent is still being registered in __clk_register(), then it can result
in the child voting its direct parent without those votes propagating up
the entire parent chain.

More details please!

Sure, will be happy to provide more. There are several ways in which the race can manifest, so I initially just tried to stick to the high-level summary. But I'll try to provide more details.



__clk_register() sets hw->core before grabbing the prepare_lock and
before initializing hw->core->parent. Since hw->core is used indirectly
by __clk_init_parent(), then children can find their parents before
they're fully initialized. If children vote for their parents during
this window, then those votes won't propagate past the direct parent.

Is the crucial detail that's missing here the fact that we now let
__clk_init_parent() find a struct clk_hw before that clk has been
published to the clk tree in __clk_core_init()? I can see the following
scenario

Essentially, yes.


struct clk_hw clkBad;
struct clk_hw clkA;

clkA.init.parent_hws = { &clkBad }

clk_hw_register(&clkA);

And now clkA has a reference to clkBad in the clk tree but the clk isn't
published to the clk tree yet. Except, clk_core_fill_parent_index() will
fail to find the parent because hw->core isn't set yet. So now I'll
write up a two CPU scenario to try to clarify.


CPU0 CPU1
---- ----
struct clk_hw clkBad;
struct clk_hw clkA;
clkA.init.parent_hws = { &clkBad };
clk_hw_register(&clkA) clk_hw_register(&clkBad)
__clk_register()
hw->core = core
...
__clk_register()
__clk_core_init()
clk_prepare_lock()
__clk_init_parent()
clk_core_get_parent_by_index()
clk_core_fill_parent_index()
if (entry->hw) {
parent = entry->hw->core;
<boom>

Yes, that's one problematic scenario. Not the specific one we were hitting, but it's one of them. More details on one of our specific scenarios below.



This can happen when:
1. CRITICAL clocks are enabled in __clk_core_init().
2. Reparenting enabled orphans in clk_core_reparent_orphans_nolock().

I didn't really follow these two points. I guess you're saying this is a
problem if we're enabling critical clks and the parents aren't
registered yet or we're reparenting a whole subtree into the clk tree
but they're still technically orphans because the parent isn't
registered.

Normally, if the parent isn't registered yet then there's no problem, since an enabled orphan will just propagate the enable/prepare counts to the parent once the parent is registered and orphan reparented. The problem comes when the parent is only partially initialized with just hw->core set.

My points above aren't actually exhaustive. If the child->parent crosses providers, then even normal client calls to clk_prepare()/clk_enable() could trigger the race condition. But for the issues we were seeing, the problematic orphan/parent pair was within a single provider. And the orphan in that case is only temporary until after the provider is finished initializing. And before it's finished initializing we haven't added the provider yet, so clients wouldn't be able to request these clocks in this problematic state. But points (1) and (2) are ways that can trigger this situation without client involvement while the provider is still being initialized.

Here's a concrete example of one of the scenarios we hit. A provider is in the middle of registering its clocks (including some temporary orphans) when another unrelated provider is added.

CPU0 CPU1
---- ----
<orphan registered>
<orphan enabled>
of_clk_add_hw_provider()
clk_core_reparent_orphans()
clk_prepare_lock()
clk_hw_register(&parent)
__clk_register()
hw->core = core
clk_core_reparent_orphans_nolock()
parent = __clk_init_parent(orphan)
if (parent) {
__clk_set_parent_before(orphan, parent);
if (core->prepare_count) {
clk_core_prepare_enable(parent);
<boom>

While reparenting orphans, CPU0 finds the direct parent since CPU1 has set the parent's hw->core. And since the orphan is already prepared, it propagates the prepare/enable counts to the new parent. But since the parent hasn't finished __clk_core_init() yet, then we haven't set the *parent's* parent yet. So the propagation stops early. Later, when the child is disabled after the parent has finished initializing, then the disable/unprepare calls *are* propagated fully. But since we never propagated all the enable/prepare calls, then there's a mismatch and we get "already disabled" or "already unprepared" warnings on the parents and return errors to the clients.

There are more possible cases than just these. So I should probably just describe the underlying problem a bit more clearly and not try to enumerate each possible resulting race.



Fix this by not setting hw->core until we've already grabbed the
prepare_lock in __clk_core_init(). This prevents orphaned children from
finding and voting their parents before the parents are fully
initialized.

Fixes: fc0c209c147f ("clk: Allow parents to be specified without string names")

Thanks! Looks correct. It would be good to describe how this commit
broke it though. Something like:

When parent clks could only be found via string name we had to wait
until the parent clk was added to a list in __clk_core_init() before we
could find it, but after commit fc0c209c147f ("clk: Allow parents to be
specified without string names") the parent clk can be found once we set
hw->core in __clk_register().

Sure, I can add more details here.


Signed-off-by: Mike Tipton <quic_mdtipton@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---

This is very difficult to reproduce. We can't reproduce it at all
internally, in fact. But some customers are able to reproduce it fairly
easily and this patch fixes it for them.

This doesn't instill very much confidence in the fix if you can't
reproduce it and can't describe the scenario where it happens. It would
have helped signal boost the patch if the customers could reply to the
list indicating this fixes things for them with tested-by tags :(

We can't reproduce it in-house reliably, but we have multiple customers who *can* reproduce it reliably in their test farms with multiple hits per-day. We've had no reports from them after merging this patch. Some customers have been running with this for over a month without any new occurrences.



drivers/clk/clk.c | 14 +++++++++++---
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/clk/clk.c b/drivers/clk/clk.c
index f467d63bbf1e..af562af9d54d 100644
--- a/drivers/clk/clk.c
+++ b/drivers/clk/clk.c
@@ -3418,6 +3418,13 @@ static int __clk_core_init(struct clk_core *core)
clk_prepare_lock();
+ /*
+ * Set hw->core after grabbing the prepare_lock to prevent race
+ * conditions with orphans finding and voting their parents before the
+ * parents are fully initialized.

Let's make this comment better by talking about
clk_core_fill_parent_index() only caring if hw->core is set to a
non-NULL value. "race conditions" is nebulous.

Sure, I can update this comment to be more specific.


+ */
+ core->hw->core = core;
+
ret = clk_pm_runtime_get(core);
if (ret)
goto unlock;
@@ -3582,8 +3589,10 @@ static int __clk_core_init(struct clk_core *core)
out:
clk_pm_runtime_put(core);
unlock:
- if (ret)
+ if (ret) {
hlist_del_init(&core->child_node);
+ core->hw->core = NULL;
+ }
clk_prepare_unlock();
@@ -3847,7 +3856,6 @@ __clk_register(struct device *dev, struct device_node *np, struct clk_hw *hw)
core->num_parents = init->num_parents;
core->min_rate = 0;
core->max_rate = ULONG_MAX;
- hw->core = core;
ret = clk_core_populate_parent_map(core, init);
if (ret)
@@ -3865,7 +3873,7 @@ __clk_register(struct device *dev, struct device_node *np, struct clk_hw *hw)
goto fail_create_clk;
}
- clk_core_link_consumer(hw->core, hw->clk);
+ clk_core_link_consumer(core, hw->clk);
ret = __clk_core_init(core);
if (!ret)

Let me see if I can fix this up on application >