| ====================================== |
| Wound/Wait Deadlock-Proof Mutex Design |
| ====================================== |
| |
| Please read mutex-design.rst first, as it applies to wait/wound mutexes too. |
| |
| Motivation for WW-Mutexes |
| ------------------------- |
| |
| GPU's do operations that commonly involve many buffers. Those buffers |
| can be shared across contexts/processes, exist in different memory |
| domains (for example VRAM vs system memory), and so on. And with |
| PRIME / dmabuf, they can even be shared across devices. So there are |
| a handful of situations where the driver needs to wait for buffers to |
| become ready. If you think about this in terms of waiting on a buffer |
| mutex for it to become available, this presents a problem because |
| there is no way to guarantee that buffers appear in a execbuf/batch in |
| the same order in all contexts. That is directly under control of |
| userspace, and a result of the sequence of GL calls that an application |
| makes. Which results in the potential for deadlock. The problem gets |
| more complex when you consider that the kernel may need to migrate the |
| buffer(s) into VRAM before the GPU operates on the buffer(s), which |
| may in turn require evicting some other buffers (and you don't want to |
| evict other buffers which are already queued up to the GPU), but for a |
| simplified understanding of the problem you can ignore this. |
| |
| The algorithm that the TTM graphics subsystem came up with for dealing with |
| this problem is quite simple. For each group of buffers (execbuf) that need |
| to be locked, the caller would be assigned a unique reservation id/ticket, |
| from a global counter. In case of deadlock while locking all the buffers |
| associated with a execbuf, the one with the lowest reservation ticket (i.e. |
| the oldest task) wins, and the one with the higher reservation id (i.e. the |
| younger task) unlocks all of the buffers that it has already locked, and then |
| tries again. |
| |
| In the RDBMS literature, a reservation ticket is associated with a transaction. |
| and the deadlock handling approach is called Wait-Die. The name is based on |
| the actions of a locking thread when it encounters an already locked mutex. |
| If the transaction holding the lock is younger, the locking transaction waits. |
| If the transaction holding the lock is older, the locking transaction backs off |
| and dies. Hence Wait-Die. |
| There is also another algorithm called Wound-Wait: |
| If the transaction holding the lock is younger, the locking transaction |
| wounds the transaction holding the lock, requesting it to die. |
| If the transaction holding the lock is older, it waits for the other |
| transaction. Hence Wound-Wait. |
| The two algorithms are both fair in that a transaction will eventually succeed. |
| However, the Wound-Wait algorithm is typically stated to generate fewer backoffs |
| compared to Wait-Die, but is, on the other hand, associated with more work than |
| Wait-Die when recovering from a backoff. Wound-Wait is also a preemptive |
| algorithm in that transactions are wounded by other transactions, and that |
| requires a reliable way to pick up the wounded condition and preempt the |
| running transaction. Note that this is not the same as process preemption. A |
| Wound-Wait transaction is considered preempted when it dies (returning |
| -EDEADLK) following a wound. |
| |
| Concepts |
| -------- |
| |
| Compared to normal mutexes two additional concepts/objects show up in the lock |
| interface for w/w mutexes: |
| |
| Acquire context: To ensure eventual forward progress it is important the a task |
| trying to acquire locks doesn't grab a new reservation id, but keeps the one it |
| acquired when starting the lock acquisition. This ticket is stored in the |
| acquire context. Furthermore the acquire context keeps track of debugging state |
| to catch w/w mutex interface abuse. An acquire context is representing a |
| transaction. |
| |
| W/w class: In contrast to normal mutexes the lock class needs to be explicit for |
| w/w mutexes, since it is required to initialize the acquire context. The lock |
| class also specifies what algorithm to use, Wound-Wait or Wait-Die. |
| |
| Furthermore there are three different class of w/w lock acquire functions: |
| |
| * Normal lock acquisition with a context, using ww_mutex_lock. |
| |
| * Slowpath lock acquisition on the contending lock, used by the task that just |
| killed its transaction after having dropped all already acquired locks. |
| These functions have the _slow postfix. |
| |
| From a simple semantics point-of-view the _slow functions are not strictly |
| required, since simply calling the normal ww_mutex_lock functions on the |
| contending lock (after having dropped all other already acquired locks) will |
| work correctly. After all if no other ww mutex has been acquired yet there's |
| no deadlock potential and hence the ww_mutex_lock call will block and not |
| prematurely return -EDEADLK. The advantage of the _slow functions is in |
| interface safety: |
| |
| - ww_mutex_lock has a __must_check int return type, whereas ww_mutex_lock_slow |
| has a void return type. Note that since ww mutex code needs loops/retries |
| anyway the __must_check doesn't result in spurious warnings, even though the |
| very first lock operation can never fail. |
| - When full debugging is enabled ww_mutex_lock_slow checks that all acquired |
| ww mutex have been released (preventing deadlocks) and makes sure that we |
| block on the contending lock (preventing spinning through the -EDEADLK |
| slowpath until the contended lock can be acquired). |
| |
| * Functions to only acquire a single w/w mutex, which results in the exact same |
| semantics as a normal mutex. This is done by calling ww_mutex_lock with a NULL |
| context. |
| |
| Again this is not strictly required. But often you only want to acquire a |
| single lock in which case it's pointless to set up an acquire context (and so |
| better to avoid grabbing a deadlock avoidance ticket). |
| |
| Of course, all the usual variants for handling wake-ups due to signals are also |
| provided. |
| |
| Usage |
| ----- |
| |
| The algorithm (Wait-Die vs Wound-Wait) is chosen by using either |
| DEFINE_WW_CLASS() (Wound-Wait) or DEFINE_WD_CLASS() (Wait-Die) |
| As a rough rule of thumb, use Wound-Wait iff you |
| expect the number of simultaneous competing transactions to be typically small, |
| and you want to reduce the number of rollbacks. |
| |
| Three different ways to acquire locks within the same w/w class. Common |
| definitions for methods #1 and #2:: |
| |
| static DEFINE_WW_CLASS(ww_class); |
| |
| struct obj { |
| struct ww_mutex lock; |
| /* obj data */ |
| }; |
| |
| struct obj_entry { |
| struct list_head head; |
| struct obj *obj; |
| }; |
| |
| Method 1, using a list in execbuf->buffers that's not allowed to be reordered. |
| This is useful if a list of required objects is already tracked somewhere. |
| Furthermore the lock helper can use propagate the -EALREADY return code back to |
| the caller as a signal that an object is twice on the list. This is useful if |
| the list is constructed from userspace input and the ABI requires userspace to |
| not have duplicate entries (e.g. for a gpu commandbuffer submission ioctl):: |
| |
| int lock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx) |
| { |
| struct obj *res_obj = NULL; |
| struct obj_entry *contended_entry = NULL; |
| struct obj_entry *entry; |
| |
| ww_acquire_init(ctx, &ww_class); |
| |
| retry: |
| list_for_each_entry (entry, list, head) { |
| if (entry->obj == res_obj) { |
| res_obj = NULL; |
| continue; |
| } |
| ret = ww_mutex_lock(&entry->obj->lock, ctx); |
| if (ret < 0) { |
| contended_entry = entry; |
| goto err; |
| } |
| } |
| |
| ww_acquire_done(ctx); |
| return 0; |
| |
| err: |
| list_for_each_entry_continue_reverse (entry, list, head) |
| ww_mutex_unlock(&entry->obj->lock); |
| |
| if (res_obj) |
| ww_mutex_unlock(&res_obj->lock); |
| |
| if (ret == -EDEADLK) { |
| /* we lost out in a seqno race, lock and retry.. */ |
| ww_mutex_lock_slow(&contended_entry->obj->lock, ctx); |
| res_obj = contended_entry->obj; |
| goto retry; |
| } |
| ww_acquire_fini(ctx); |
| |
| return ret; |
| } |
| |
| Method 2, using a list in execbuf->buffers that can be reordered. Same semantics |
| of duplicate entry detection using -EALREADY as method 1 above. But the |
| list-reordering allows for a bit more idiomatic code:: |
| |
| int lock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx) |
| { |
| struct obj_entry *entry, *entry2; |
| |
| ww_acquire_init(ctx, &ww_class); |
| |
| list_for_each_entry (entry, list, head) { |
| ret = ww_mutex_lock(&entry->obj->lock, ctx); |
| if (ret < 0) { |
| entry2 = entry; |
| |
| list_for_each_entry_continue_reverse (entry2, list, head) |
| ww_mutex_unlock(&entry2->obj->lock); |
| |
| if (ret != -EDEADLK) { |
| ww_acquire_fini(ctx); |
| return ret; |
| } |
| |
| /* we lost out in a seqno race, lock and retry.. */ |
| ww_mutex_lock_slow(&entry->obj->lock, ctx); |
| |
| /* |
| * Move buf to head of the list, this will point |
| * buf->next to the first unlocked entry, |
| * restarting the for loop. |
| */ |
| list_del(&entry->head); |
| list_add(&entry->head, list); |
| } |
| } |
| |
| ww_acquire_done(ctx); |
| return 0; |
| } |
| |
| Unlocking works the same way for both methods #1 and #2:: |
| |
| void unlock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx) |
| { |
| struct obj_entry *entry; |
| |
| list_for_each_entry (entry, list, head) |
| ww_mutex_unlock(&entry->obj->lock); |
| |
| ww_acquire_fini(ctx); |
| } |
| |
| Method 3 is useful if the list of objects is constructed ad-hoc and not upfront, |
| e.g. when adjusting edges in a graph where each node has its own ww_mutex lock, |
| and edges can only be changed when holding the locks of all involved nodes. w/w |
| mutexes are a natural fit for such a case for two reasons: |
| |
| - They can handle lock-acquisition in any order which allows us to start walking |
| a graph from a starting point and then iteratively discovering new edges and |
| locking down the nodes those edges connect to. |
| - Due to the -EALREADY return code signalling that a given objects is already |
| held there's no need for additional book-keeping to break cycles in the graph |
| or keep track off which looks are already held (when using more than one node |
| as a starting point). |
| |
| Note that this approach differs in two important ways from the above methods: |
| |
| - Since the list of objects is dynamically constructed (and might very well be |
| different when retrying due to hitting the -EDEADLK die condition) there's |
| no need to keep any object on a persistent list when it's not locked. We can |
| therefore move the list_head into the object itself. |
| - On the other hand the dynamic object list construction also means that the -EALREADY return |
| code can't be propagated. |
| |
| Note also that methods #1 and #2 and method #3 can be combined, e.g. to first lock a |
| list of starting nodes (passed in from userspace) using one of the above |
| methods. And then lock any additional objects affected by the operations using |
| method #3 below. The backoff/retry procedure will be a bit more involved, since |
| when the dynamic locking step hits -EDEADLK we also need to unlock all the |
| objects acquired with the fixed list. But the w/w mutex debug checks will catch |
| any interface misuse for these cases. |
| |
| Also, method 3 can't fail the lock acquisition step since it doesn't return |
| -EALREADY. Of course this would be different when using the _interruptible |
| variants, but that's outside of the scope of these examples here:: |
| |
| struct obj { |
| struct ww_mutex ww_mutex; |
| struct list_head locked_list; |
| }; |
| |
| static DEFINE_WW_CLASS(ww_class); |
| |
| void __unlock_objs(struct list_head *list) |
| { |
| struct obj *entry, *temp; |
| |
| list_for_each_entry_safe (entry, temp, list, locked_list) { |
| /* need to do that before unlocking, since only the current lock holder is |
| allowed to use object */ |
| list_del(&entry->locked_list); |
| ww_mutex_unlock(entry->ww_mutex) |
| } |
| } |
| |
| void lock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx) |
| { |
| struct obj *obj; |
| |
| ww_acquire_init(ctx, &ww_class); |
| |
| retry: |
| /* re-init loop start state */ |
| loop { |
| /* magic code which walks over a graph and decides which objects |
| * to lock */ |
| |
| ret = ww_mutex_lock(obj->ww_mutex, ctx); |
| if (ret == -EALREADY) { |
| /* we have that one already, get to the next object */ |
| continue; |
| } |
| if (ret == -EDEADLK) { |
| __unlock_objs(list); |
| |
| ww_mutex_lock_slow(obj, ctx); |
| list_add(&entry->locked_list, list); |
| goto retry; |
| } |
| |
| /* locked a new object, add it to the list */ |
| list_add_tail(&entry->locked_list, list); |
| } |
| |
| ww_acquire_done(ctx); |
| return 0; |
| } |
| |
| void unlock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx) |
| { |
| __unlock_objs(list); |
| ww_acquire_fini(ctx); |
| } |
| |
| Method 4: Only lock one single objects. In that case deadlock detection and |
| prevention is obviously overkill, since with grabbing just one lock you can't |
| produce a deadlock within just one class. To simplify this case the w/w mutex |
| api can be used with a NULL context. |
| |
| Implementation Details |
| ---------------------- |
| |
| Design: |
| ^^^^^^^ |
| |
| ww_mutex currently encapsulates a struct mutex, this means no extra overhead for |
| normal mutex locks, which are far more common. As such there is only a small |
| increase in code size if wait/wound mutexes are not used. |
| |
| We maintain the following invariants for the wait list: |
| |
| (1) Waiters with an acquire context are sorted by stamp order; waiters |
| without an acquire context are interspersed in FIFO order. |
| (2) For Wait-Die, among waiters with contexts, only the first one can have |
| other locks acquired already (ctx->acquired > 0). Note that this waiter |
| may come after other waiters without contexts in the list. |
| |
| The Wound-Wait preemption is implemented with a lazy-preemption scheme: |
| The wounded status of the transaction is checked only when there is |
| contention for a new lock and hence a true chance of deadlock. In that |
| situation, if the transaction is wounded, it backs off, clears the |
| wounded status and retries. A great benefit of implementing preemption in |
| this way is that the wounded transaction can identify a contending lock to |
| wait for before restarting the transaction. Just blindly restarting the |
| transaction would likely make the transaction end up in a situation where |
| it would have to back off again. |
| |
| In general, not much contention is expected. The locks are typically used to |
| serialize access to resources for devices, and optimization focus should |
| therefore be directed towards the uncontended cases. |
| |
| Lockdep: |
| ^^^^^^^^ |
| |
| Special care has been taken to warn for as many cases of api abuse |
| as possible. Some common api abuses will be caught with |
| CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES, but CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING is recommended. |
| |
| Some of the errors which will be warned about: |
| - Forgetting to call ww_acquire_fini or ww_acquire_init. |
| - Attempting to lock more mutexes after ww_acquire_done. |
| - Attempting to lock the wrong mutex after -EDEADLK and |
| unlocking all mutexes. |
| - Attempting to lock the right mutex after -EDEADLK, |
| before unlocking all mutexes. |
| |
| - Calling ww_mutex_lock_slow before -EDEADLK was returned. |
| |
| - Unlocking mutexes with the wrong unlock function. |
| - Calling one of the ww_acquire_* twice on the same context. |
| - Using a different ww_class for the mutex than for the ww_acquire_ctx. |
| - Normal lockdep errors that can result in deadlocks. |
| |
| Some of the lockdep errors that can result in deadlocks: |
| - Calling ww_acquire_init to initialize a second ww_acquire_ctx before |
| having called ww_acquire_fini on the first. |
| - 'normal' deadlocks that can occur. |
| |
| FIXME: |
| Update this section once we have the TASK_DEADLOCK task state flag magic |
| implemented. |