Linux Virtualization - Sep 2018 - [RFC PATCH 2/2] virtio/s390: fix race in ccw_io_helper()

On Wed, 19 Sep 2018 15:17:28 +0200
Halil Pasic <pasic at linux.ibm.com> wrote:
> On 09/18/2018 08:45 PM, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> > We basically have two options:
> > - Have a way to queue I/O operations and then handle them in sequence.
> >   Creates complexity, and is likely overkill. (We already have a kind
> >   of serialization because we re-submit the channel program until the
> >   hypervisor accepts it; the problem comes from the wait queue usage.)
> 
> I secretly hoped we already have something like this somewhere. Getting
> some kind of requests processed and wanting to know if each of these worked
> or not seemed like fairly common. I agree, implementing this just for
> virtio-ccw would be an overkill, I agree.
I've encountered that pattern so far mostly for driver-internal I/O
(setting some stuff up via channel commands etc.) Other usages (like
e.g. the dasd driver processing block layer requests) are asynchronous,
and the common I/O layer uses a full-fledged fsm. Much of the trouble
comes from implementing a synchronous interface via asynchronous
commands, and I'd really like to keep that as simple as possible
(especially as this is not the hot path).
> 
> > - Add serialization around the submit/wait procedure (as you did), but
> >   with a per-device mutex. That looks like the easiest solution.
> >   
> 
> Yep, I'm for doing something like this first. We can think about doing
> something more elaborate later. I will send a non-RFC with an extra
> per-device mutex. Unless you object.
No, that sounds good to me.
> 
> Another thought that crossed my head was making the transport ops
> mutex on each virtio-ccw device -- see our conversation on get/set
> config. I don't think it would make a big difference, since the
> ccw stuff is mutex already, so we only have parallelism for the
> preparation and for post-processing the results of the ccw io.
Do you spot any other places where we may need to care about concurrent
processing (like for the ->config area in the previous patch)?