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Date:   Tue, 5 Jul 2022 12:07:25 +0100
From:   Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
To:     Kajetan Puchalski <kajetan.puchalski@arm.com>
Cc:     Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>,
        Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>,
        Jozsef Kadlecsik <kadlec@netfilter.org>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>,
        Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>,
        Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>,
        lukasz.luba@arm.com, dietmar.eggemann@arm.com,
        mark.rutland@arm.com, mark.brown@arm.com,
        netfilter-devel@vger.kernel.org, coreteam@netfilter.org,
        netdev@vger.kernel.org, stable@vger.kernel.org,
        regressions@lists.linux.dev, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        peterz@infradead.org
Subject: Re: [Regression] stress-ng udp-flood causes kernel panic on Ampere
 Altra
Message-ID: <20220705110724.GB711@willie-the-truck>
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On Tue, Jul 05, 2022 at 11:57:49AM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2022 at 11:53:22AM +0100, Kajetan Puchalski wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 04, 2022 at 10:22:24AM +0100, Kajetan Puchalski wrote:
> > > On Sat, Jul 02, 2022 at 10:56:51PM +0200, Florian Westphal wrote:
> > > > > That would make sense, from further experiments I ran it somehow seems
> > > > > to be related to the number of workers being spawned by stress-ng along
> > > > > with the CPUs/cores involved.
> > > > >
> > > > > For instance, running the test with <=25 workers (--udp-flood 25 etc.)
> > > > > results in the test running fine for at least 15 minutes.
> > > > 
> > > > Ok.  I will let it run for longer on the machines I have access to.
> > > > 
> > > > In mean time, you could test attached patch, its simple s/refcount_/atomic_/
> > > > in nf_conntrack.
> > > > 
> > > > If mainline (patch vs. HEAD 69cb6c6556ad89620547318439) crashes for you
> > > > but works with attached patch someone who understands aarch64 memory ordering
> > > > would have to look more closely at refcount_XXX functions to see where they
> > > > might differ from atomic_ ones.
> > > 
> > > I can confirm that the patch seems to solve the issue.
> > > With it applied on top of the 5.19-rc5 tag the test runs fine for at
> > > least 15 minutes which was not the case before so it looks like it is
> > > that aarch64 memory ordering problem.
> > 
> > I'm CCing some people who should be able to help with aarch64 memory
> > ordering, maybe they could take a look.
> > 
> > (re-sending due to a typo in CC, sorry for duplicate emails!)
> 
> Sorry, but I have absolutely no context here. We have a handy document
> describing the differences between atomic_t and refcount_t:
> 
> 	Documentation/core-api/refcount-vs-atomic.rst
> 
> What else do you need to know?

Hmm, and I see a tonne of *_inc_not_zero() conversions in 719774377622
("netfilter: conntrack: convert to refcount_t api") which mean that you
no longer have ordering to subsequent reads in the absence of an address
dependency.

Will