2023-06-26 17:34:59

by Dmitry Vyukov

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Thread-safety annotations for irq/rcu/atomic contexts

Hi,

Previous Lukas' attempt to apply clang thread-safety annotations to the kernel:
https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/CBL-meetup-2020-slides/lukas/tsa.pdf

I am thinking if the annotations can be used to check for functions
that must/must not be called from irq/atomic/rcu_read/etc contexts.
Namely, we create global fake locks that denote these contexts, then
annotate spin_lock_irqsave/irqrestore/etc as taking releasing these
locks, and finally annotate functions are requiring/excluding these
contexts:

void foo() require(irq_context);
void bar() exclude(irq_context);
void baz() require(rcu_read_context);

This may help to catch "suspicious RCU usage", "scheduling while
atomic" and similar bug types statically. I suspect it may also be
simpler (?) to do rather than annotating all normal locks.

Does it make any sense?


2023-06-26 17:41:37

by Nick Desaulniers

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Thread-safety annotations for irq/rcu/atomic contexts

(minus old ML, plus new ML)

On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 10:21 AM 'Dmitry Vyukov' via Clang Built Linux
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Previous Lukas' attempt to apply clang thread-safety annotations to the kernel:
> https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/CBL-meetup-2020-slides/lukas/tsa.pdf
>
> I am thinking if the annotations can be used to check for functions
> that must/must not be called from irq/atomic/rcu_read/etc contexts.
> Namely, we create global fake locks that denote these contexts, then
> annotate spin_lock_irqsave/irqrestore/etc as taking releasing these
> locks, and finally annotate functions are requiring/excluding these
> contexts:
>
> void foo() require(irq_context);
> void bar() exclude(irq_context);
> void baz() require(rcu_read_context);
>
> This may help to catch "suspicious RCU usage", "scheduling while
> atomic" and similar bug types statically. I suspect it may also be
> simpler (?) to do rather than annotating all normal locks.
>
> Does it make any sense?
>
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--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers