[PATCH 1/4] locking/ww_mutex: Fix a deadlock affecting ww_mutexes

Daniel Vetter daniel at ffwll.ch
Wed Nov 23 13:11:42 UTC 2016


On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 02:08:48PM +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 02:00:46PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 12:25:22PM +0100, Nicolai Hähnle wrote:
> > > From: Nicolai Hähnle <Nicolai.Haehnle at amd.com>
> > > 
> > > Fix a race condition involving 4 threads and 2 ww_mutexes as indicated in
> > > the following example. Acquire context stamps are ordered like the thread
> > > numbers, i.e. thread #1 should back off when it encounters a mutex locked
> > > by thread #0 etc.
> > > 
> > > Thread #0    Thread #1    Thread #2    Thread #3
> > > ---------    ---------    ---------    ---------
> > >                                        lock(ww)
> > >                                        success
> > >              lock(ww')
> > >              success
> > >                           lock(ww)
> > >              lock(ww)        .
> > >                 .            .         unlock(ww) part 1
> > > lock(ww)        .            .            .
> > > success         .            .            .
> > >                 .            .         unlock(ww) part 2
> > >                 .         back off
> > > lock(ww')       .
> > >    .            .
> > > (stuck)      (stuck)
> > > 
> > > Here, unlock(ww) part 1 is the part that sets lock->base.count to 1
> > > (without being protected by lock->base.wait_lock), meaning that thread #0
> > > can acquire ww in the fast path or, much more likely, the medium path
> > > in mutex_optimistic_spin. Since lock->base.count == 0, thread #0 then
> > > won't wake up any of the waiters in ww_mutex_set_context_fastpath.
> > > 
> > > Then, unlock(ww) part 2 wakes up _only_the_first_ waiter of ww. This is
> > > thread #2, since waiters are added at the tail. Thread #2 wakes up and
> > > backs off since it sees ww owned by a context with a lower stamp.
> > > 
> > > Meanwhile, thread #1 is never woken up, and so it won't back off its lock
> > > on ww'. So thread #0 gets stuck waiting for ww' to be released.
> > > 
> > > This patch fixes the deadlock by waking up all waiters in the slow path
> > > of ww_mutex_unlock.
> > > 
> > > We have an internal test case for amdgpu which continuously submits
> > > command streams from tens of threads, where all command streams reference
> > > hundreds of GPU buffer objects with a lot of overlap in the buffer lists
> > > between command streams. This test reliably caused a deadlock, and while I
> > > haven't completely confirmed that it is exactly the scenario outlined
> > > above, this patch does fix the test case.
> > > 
> > > v2:
> > > - use wake_q_add
> > > - add additional explanations
> > > 
> > > Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz at infradead.org>
> > > Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo at redhat.com>
> > > Cc: Chris Wilson <chris at chris-wilson.co.uk>
> > > Cc: Maarten Lankhorst <maarten.lankhorst at canonical.com>
> > > Cc: dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> > > Cc: stable at vger.kernel.org
> > > Reviewed-by: Christian König <christian.koenig at amd.com> (v1)
> > > Signed-off-by: Nicolai Hähnle <nicolai.haehnle at amd.com>
> > 
> > Completely and utterly fails to apply; I think this patch is based on
> > code prior to the mutex rewrite.
> > 
> > Please rebase on tip/locking/core.
> > 
> > Also, is this a regression, or has this been a 'feature' of the ww_mutex
> > code from early on?
> 
> Sorry forgot to mention that, but I checked. Seems to have been broken
> since day 1, at least looking at the original code the wake-single-waiter
> stuff is as old as the mutex code added in 2006.

More details: For gpu drivers this was originally working, since the
ww_mutex implementation in ttm did use wake_up_all. So need to add a

Fixes: 5e338405119a ("drm/ttm: convert to the reservation api")
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch


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