----- On Aug 4, 2020, at 10:34 AM, Peter Zijlstra peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 12:00:09PM -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote: >> exit_mm should issue memory barriers after user-space memory accesses, >> before clearing current->mm, to order user-space memory accesses >> performed prior to exit_mm before clearing tsk->mm, which has the >> effect of skipping the membarrier private expedited IPIs. >> >> The membarrier system call can be issued concurrently with do_exit >> if we have thread groups created with CLONE_VM but not CLONE_THREAD. > > I'm still wonder what the exact failure case is though; exit_mm() is on > the exit path (as the name very much implies) and the thread is about to > die. The context switch that follows guarantees a full barrier before we > run anything else again. Here is the scenario I have in mind: Two thread groups are created, A and B. Thread group B is created by issuing clone from group A with flag CLONE_VM set, but not CLONE_THREAD. Let's assume we have a single thread within each thread group (Thread A and Thread B). The AFAIU we can have: Userspace variables: int x = 0, y = 0; CPU 0 CPU 1 Thread A Thread B (in thread group A) (in thread group B) x = 1 barrier() y = 1 exit() exit_mm() current->mm = NULL; r1 = load y membarrier() skips CPU 0 (no IPI) because its current mm is NULL r2 = load x BUG_ON(r1 == 1 && r2 == 0) Thanks, Mathieu -- Mathieu Desnoyers EfficiOS Inc. http://www.efficios.com