Fix: defer_rcu: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups
authorMathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Wed, 22 Jun 2022 20:46:50 +0000 (16:46 -0400)
committerMathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Mon, 27 Jun 2022 14:30:13 +0000 (10:30 -0400)
commit879a3e166178d16b2ffedc73899904d52285cfe8
tree550386423ef2bb320d42ce62dabddebd10fab91b
parent98d705dd32be11b3f134b5aed87f9c201c028c10
Fix: defer_rcu: futex wait: handle spurious futex wakeups

Observed issue
==============

The urcu-defer wait_defer() implements a futex wait/wakeup scheme identical to
the workqueue code, which has an issue with spurious wakeups.

A spurious wakeup on wait_defer can cause wait_defer to return with a
defer_thread_futex state of -1, which is unexpected. It would cause the
following loops in thr_defer() to decrement the defer_thread_futex to
values below -1, thus actively using CPU as values will be decremented
to very low negative values until it reaches 0 through underflow, or
until callbacks are eventually queued. The state is restored to 0 when
callbacks are found, which restores the futex state to a correct state
for the following calls to wait_defer().

This issue will cause spurious unexpected high CPU use, but will not
lead to data corruption.

Cause
=====

From futex(5):

       FUTEX_WAIT
              Returns 0 if the caller was woken up.  Note that a  wake-up  can
              also  be caused by common futex usage patterns in unrelated code
              that happened to have previously used the  futex  word's  memory
              location  (e.g., typical futex-based implementations of Pthreads
              mutexes can cause this under some conditions).  Therefore, call‐
              ers should always conservatively assume that a return value of 0
              can mean a spurious wake-up, and  use  the  futex  word's  value
              (i.e.,  the user-space synchronization scheme) to decide whether
              to continue to block or not.

Solution
========

We therefore need to validate whether the value differs from -1 in
user-space after the call to FUTEX_WAIT returns 0.

Known drawbacks
===============

None.

Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Change-Id: Id9c104c0bb77cc306f0b8fbf0b924bdda2aaaf4c
src/urcu-defer-impl.h
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