linux-imx

rcu: Reject memory-order-induced stall-warning false positives

If a system is idle from an RCU perspective for longer than specified
by CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_TIMEOUT, and if one CPU starts a grace period
just as a second checks for CPU stalls, and if this second CPU happens
to see the old value of rsp->jiffies_stall, it will incorrectly report a
CPU stall.  This is quite rare, but apparently occurs deterministically
on systems with about 6TB of memory.

This commit therefore orders accesses to the data used to determine
whether or not a CPU stall is in progress.  Grace-period initialization
and cleanup first increments rsp->completed to mark the end of the
previous grace period, then records the current jiffies in rsp->gp_start,
then records the jiffies at which a stall can be expected to occur in
rsp->jiffies_stall, and finally increments rsp->gpnum to mark the start
of the new grace period.  Now, this ordering by itself does not prevent
false positives.  For example, if grace-period initialization was delayed
between recording rsp->gp_start and rsp->jiffies_stall, the CPU stall
warning code might still see an old value of rsp->jiffies_stall.

Therefore, this commit also orders the CPU stall warning accesses as
well, loading rsp->gpnum and jiffies, then rsp->jiffies_stall, then
rsp->gp_start, and finally rsp->completed.  This ordering means that
the false-positive scenario in the previous paragraph would result
in rsp->completed being greater than or equal to rsp->gpnum, which is
never valid for a CPU stall, allowing the false positive to be rejected.
Furthermore, any fetch that gets an old value of rsp->jiffies_stall
must also get an old value of rsp->gpnum, which will again be rejected
by the comparison of rsp->gpnum and rsp->completed.  Situations where
rsp->gp_start is later than rsp->jiffies_stall are also rejected, as
are situations where jiffies is less than rsp->jiffies_stall.

Although use of unsynchronized accesses means that there are likely
still some false-positive scenarios (synchronization has proven to be
a very bad idea on large systems), this should get rid of a large class
of these scenarios.

Reported-by: Fabian Herschel <fabian.herschel@suse.com>
Reported-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Tested-by: Jochen Striepe <jochen@tolot.escape.de>