On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 12:25:11PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > > Yes. If the NMI returns to kernel space you must not attempt preemption > > for reasons you found :-), > > Last time I looked at this, I decided that there was no reason that > NMIs would ever need to handle preemption. Even if the NMI hit > interruptible kernel code, anything that would cause preemption to be > needed would either send an IPI (and thus cause preemption) right > after the NMI fiinished. NMI handlers themselves have no business > setting TIF_NEED_RESCHED or similar. Good point, they don't and therefore you need not bother. > > if the NMI returns to userspace you should do > > the normal return to user bits, I think. > > x86 does this for simplicity. There was a really nasty corner case > that I could only figure out how to solve by special casing NMIs from > user space. I'm not sure that it's actually necessary from a > non-arch-specific POV to handle all the usual return-to-userspace work > on NMI. But maybe perf NMIs can send signals? No it cannot. It uses irq_work (which sends a self-IPI) when it wants to do signals. > >> 2. The low level return code, resume_user_mode_begin and/or resume_kernel_mode > >> require interrupt safety, does that need to be NMI safe as well. We ofcourse want > >> the very late register restore parts to be non-interruptible, but is this required > >> before we call prrempt_schedule_irq() off of asm code. > > > > Urgh, I'm never quite sure on the details here, I've Cc'ed Andy who > > might actually know this off the top of his head. I'll try and dig > > through x86 to see what it does. > > On x86, it's quite simple. IRQs are *always* off during the final > register restore, and we don't re-check for preemption there. x86 > handles preemption after turning off IRQs, and IRQs are guaranteed to > stay off until we actually return to userspace. > > The code is almost entirely in C in arch/x86/entry/common.c. There > isn't anything particularly x86-speficic in there. Right, so what I think Vineet is asking is if we need to disable NMIs as well, we cannot on x86 disable NMIs so no.
