[tip: locking/kcsan] seqlock: Require WRITE_ONCE surrounding raw_seqcount_barrier

[tip: locking/kcsan] seqlock: Require WRITE_ONCE surrounding raw_seqcount_barrier

[tip-bot2 for Marco Elver]

The following commit has been merged into the locking/kcsan branch of tip:

Commit-ID:     bf07132f96d426bcbf2098227fb680915cf44498
Gitweb:        https://git.kernel.org/tip/bf07132f96d426bcbf2098227fb680915cf44498
Author:        Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
AuthorDate:    Thu, 14 Nov 2019 19:03:00 +01:00
Committer:     Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
CommitterDate: Sat, 16 Nov 2019 07:23:15 -08:00

seqlock: Require WRITE_ONCE surrounding raw_seqcount_barrier

This patch proposes to require marked atomic accesses surrounding
raw_write_seqcount_barrier. We reason that otherwise there is no way to
guarantee propagation nor atomicity of writes before/after the barrier
[1]. For example, consider the compiler tears stores either before or
after the barrier; in this case, readers may observe a partial value,
and because readers are unaware that writes are going on (writes are not
in a seq-writer critical section), will complete the seq-reader critical
section while having observed some partial state.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/793253/

This came up when designing and implementing KCSAN, because KCSAN would
flag these accesses as data-races. After careful analysis, our reasoning
as above led us to conclude that the best thing to do is to propose an
amendment to the raw_seqcount_barrier usage.

Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
---
 include/linux/seqlock.h | 11 +++++++++--
 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/linux/seqlock.h b/include/linux/seqlock.h
index 61232bc..f52c91b 100644
--- a/include/linux/seqlock.h
+++ b/include/linux/seqlock.h
@@ -265,6 +265,13 @@ static inline void raw_write_seqcount_end(seqcount_t *s)
  * usual consistency guarantee. It is one wmb cheaper, because we can
  * collapse the two back-to-back wmb()s.
  *
+ * Note that, writes surrounding the barrier should be declared atomic (e.g.
+ * via WRITE_ONCE): a) to ensure the writes become visible to other threads
+ * atomically, avoiding compiler optimizations; b) to document which writes are
+ * meant to propagate to the reader critical section. This is necessary because
+ * neither writes before and after the barrier are enclosed in a seq-writer
+ * critical section that would ensure readers are aware of ongoing writes.
+ *
  *      seqcount_t seq;
  *      bool X = true, Y = false;
  *
@@ -284,11 +291,11 @@ static inline void raw_write_seqcount_end(seqcount_t *s)
  *
  *      void write(void)
  *      {
- *              Y = true;
+ *              WRITE_ONCE(Y, true);
  *
  *              raw_write_seqcount_barrier(seq);
  *
- *              X = false;
+ *              WRITE_ONCE(X, false);
  *      }
  */
 static inline void raw_write_seqcount_barrier(seqcount_t *s)