Re: [PATCH v3 6/9] x86/smpboot: Support parallel startup of secondary CPUs

[Borislav Petkov]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 12:39:17PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> In the top of my git tree, you can see a half-baked 'parallel part 2'
> commit which introduces a new x86/cpu:wait-init cpuhp state that would
> invoke do_wait_cpu_initialized() for each CPU in turn, which *would*
> release them all into load_ucode_bsp() at the same time and have
> precisely the problem you're describing.

The load_ucode_bsp() is the variant that runs on the boot CPU but
yeah...

> I'll commit a FIXME comment now so that it doesn't slip my mind.

Yap, thank Cooper for pointing out that whole thing about how microcode
loading is special and can't always handle parallelism. :)

> Hm, not sure I see how that's protecting itself from someone
> simultaneously echoing 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu${SIBLING}/online

So

echo 1 > ../online

means onlining the sibling.

But reload_store() grabs the CPU hotplug lock *first* and *then* runs
check_online_cpus() to see if all CPUs are online. It doesn't do the
update if even one CPU is missing. You can't offline any CPU for the
duration of the update...

So I guess you'd need to explain in more detail what protection hole
you're seeing because I might be missing something here.

Thx.

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette