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Date:   Sat, 29 Jun 2019 20:09:10 +0200
From:   Andrea Parri <andrea.parri@amarulasolutions.com>
To:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.ibm.com>
Cc:     Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Byungchul Park <byungchul.park@lge.com>,
        Scott Wood <swood@redhat.com>,
        Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>,
        Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>,
        rcu <rcu@vger.kernel.org>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>,
        Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>,
        Lai Jiangshan <jiangshanlai@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Deadlock via recursive wakeup via RCU with threadirqs
Message-ID: <20190629180910.GA3399@andrea>
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On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 09:55:33AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 05:12:36PM +0200, Andrea Parri wrote:
> > Hi Steve,
> > 
> > > As Paul stated, interrupts are synchronization points. Archs can only
> > > play games with ordering when dealing with entities outside the CPU
> > > (devices and other CPUs). But if you have assembly that has two stores,
> > > and an interrupt comes in, the arch must guarantee that the stores are
> > > done in that order as the interrupt sees it.
> > 
> > Hopefully I'm not derailing the conversation too much with my questions
> > ... but I was wondering if we had any documentation (or inline comments)
> > elaborating on this "interrupts are synchronization points"?
> 
> I don't know of any, but I would suggest instead looking at something
> like the Hennessey and Patterson computer-architecture textbook.
> 
> Please keep in mind that the rather detailed documentation on RCU is a
> bit of an outlier due to the fact that there are not so many textbooks
> that cover RCU.  If we tried to replicate all of the relevant textbooks
> in the Documentation directory, it would be quite a large mess.  ;-)

You know some developers considered it worth to develop formal specs in
order to better understand concepts such as "synchronization" and "IRQs
(processing)"! ...  ;-)  I still think that adding a few paragraphs (if
only in informal prose) to explain that "interrupts are synchronization
points" wouln't hurt.  And you're right, I guess we may well start from
a reference to H&P...

Remark: we do have code which (while acknowledging that "interrupts are
synchronization points") doesn't quite seem to "believe it", c.f., e.g.,
kernel/sched/membarrier.c:ipi_mb().  So, I guess the follow-up question
would be "Would we better be (more) paranoid? ..."

Thanks,
  Andrea