Herbert Xu pointed out that commit bb73c52bad ("rcu: Don't disable
preemption for Tiny and Tree RCU readers") was incorrect in making the
preempt_disable/enable() be conditional on CONFIG_PREEMPT_COUNT.
If CONFIG_PREEMPT_COUNT isn't enabled, the preemption enable/disable is
a no-op, but still is a compiler barrier.
And RCU locking still _needs_ that compiler barrier.
It is simply fundamentally not true that RCU locking would be a complete
no-op: we still need to guarantee (for example) that things that can
trap and cause preemption cannot migrate into the RCU locked region.
The way we do that is by making it a barrier.
See for example commit 386afc9114 ("spinlocks and preemption points
need to be at least compiler barriers") from back in 2013 that had
similar issues with spinlocks that become no-ops on UP: they must still
constrain the compiler from moving other operations into the critical
region.
Now, it is true that a lot of RCU operations already use READ_ONCE() and
WRITE_ONCE() (which in practice likely would never be re-ordered wrt
anything remotely interesting), but it is also true that that is not
globally the case, and that it's not even necessarily always possible
(ie bitfields etc).
Reported-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Fixes: bb73c52bad ("rcu: Don't disable preemption for Tiny and Tree RCU readers")
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.
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