Re: [PATCH] ppc64: Fix possible race with set_pte on a present PTE

[Keith M Wesolowski <wesolows@foobazco.org>]

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 07:48:24AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> > > the equivalent. You can always do it with a simple compare-and-exchange 
> > > loop, something any SMP-capable architecture should have.
> 
> The race is:
>  - one CPU sets the dirty bit (possibly with a hardware walker, but I 
>    guess on PA it's probably done in sw)
>  - the other CPU sets the accessed bit in sw as part of the 
>    "handle_pte_fault()" processing.
> 
> Right now we set the accessed bit with a simple "ptep_establish()", which 
> will use "set_pte()", which is just a regular write. So setting the 
> accessed bit will basically be a nonatomic sequence of
> 
>  - read pte entry
>  - entry = pte_mkyoung(entry)
>  - set_pte(entry)
> 
> which is all done under the mm->page_table_lock, but which does NOT 
> protect against any hardware page-table walkers or any asynchronous sw 
> walkers (if anybody does them).

Some sparc32 CPUs are also vulnerable to this race; in fact the
supersparc manual describes it specifically and even outlines the
compare-exchange loop using our rotten swap instruction.  In our case,
the race is with a hardware walker.

-- 
Keith M Wesolowski
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