Quoting Christian König (2017-09-11 10:06:50)
Am 11.09.2017 um 10:59 schrieb Chris Wilson:
Quoting Christian König (2017-09-11 09:50:40)
Sorry for the delayed response, but your mail somehow ended up in the Spam folder.
Am 04.09.2017 um 15:40 schrieb Chris Wilson:
Quoting Christian König (2017-09-04 14:27:33)
From: Christian König christian.koenig@amd.com
The logic is buggy and unnecessary complex. When dma_fence_get_rcu() fails to acquire a reference it doesn't necessary mean that there is no fence at all.
It usually mean that the fence was replaced by a new one and in this situation we certainly want to have the new one as result and *NOT* NULL.
Which is not guaranteed by the code you wrote either.
The point of the comment is that the mb is only inside the successful kref_atomic_inc_unless_zero, and that only after that mb do you know whether or not you have the current fence.
You can argue that you want to replace the if (!dma_fence_get_rcu()) return NULL with if (!dma_fence_get_rcu() continue; but it would be incorrect to say that by simply ignoring the post-condition check that you do have the right fence.
You are completely missing the point here.
It is irrelevant if you have the current fence or not when you return. You can only guarantee that it is the current fence when you take a look and that is exactly what we want to avoid.
So the existing code is complete nonsense. Instead what we need to guarantee is that we return *ANY* fence which we can grab a reference for.
Not quite. We can grab a reference on a fence that was already freed and reused between the rcu_dereference() and dma_fence_get_rcu().
Reusing a memory structure before the RCU grace period is completed is illegal, otherwise the whole RCU approach won't work.
RCU only protects that the pointer remains valid. If you use SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, it is possible to reuse the pointer within a grace period. It does happen and that is the point the comment is trying to make. -Chris