locking/qspinlock: Remove unbounded cmpxchg() loop from locking slowpath

The qspinlock locking slowpath utilises a "pending" bit as a simple form
of an embedded test-and-set lock that can avoid the overhead of explicit
queuing in cases where the lock is held but uncontended. This bit is
managed using a cmpxchg() loop which tries to transition the uncontended
lock word from (0,0,0) -> (0,0,1) or (0,0,1) -> (0,1,1).

Unfortunately, the cmpxchg() loop is unbounded and lockers can be starved
indefinitely if the lock word is seen to oscillate between unlocked
(0,0,0) and locked (0,0,1). This could happen if concurrent lockers are
able to take the lock in the cmpxchg() loop without queuing and pass it
around amongst themselves.

This patch fixes the problem by unconditionally setting _Q_PENDING_VAL
using atomic_fetch_or, and then inspecting the old value to see whether
we need to spin on the current lock owner, or whether we now effectively
hold the lock. The tricky scenario is when concurrent lockers end up
queuing on the lock and the lock becomes available, causing us to see
a lockword of (n,0,0). With pending now set, simply queuing could lead
to deadlock as the head of the queue may not have observed the pending
flag being cleared. Conversely, if the head of the queue did observe
pending being cleared, then it could transition the lock from (n,0,0) ->
(0,0,1) meaning that any attempt to "undo" our setting of the pending
bit could race with a concurrent locker trying to set it.

We handle this race by preserving the pending bit when taking the lock
after reaching the head of the queue and leaving the tail entry intact
if we saw pending set, because we know that the tail is going to be
updated shortly.

Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: boqun.feng@gmail.com
Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
Cc: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1524738868-31318-6-git-send-email-will.deacon@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h b/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h
index 2711940429f5..2dbad2f25480 100644
--- a/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h
+++ b/kernel/locking/qspinlock_paravirt.h
@@ -118,11 +118,6 @@ static __always_inline void set_pending(struct qspinlock *lock)
 	WRITE_ONCE(lock->pending, 1);
 }
 
-static __always_inline void clear_pending(struct qspinlock *lock)
-{
-	WRITE_ONCE(lock->pending, 0);
-}
-
 /*
  * The pending bit check in pv_queued_spin_steal_lock() isn't a memory
  * barrier. Therefore, an atomic cmpxchg_acquire() is used to acquire the