Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64: Support the TSO memory model

From: "Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
To: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Cc: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>,
	 Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>,
	 Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org>,
	 Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>,
	 Zayd Qumsieh <zayd_qumsieh@apple.com>,
	 Justin Lu <ih_justin@apple.com>,
	 Ryan Houdek <Houdek.Ryan@fex-emu.org>,
	 Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>,
	 Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>,
	 Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik@gmail.com>,
	 Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@arm.com>,
	Oliver Upton <oliver.upton@linux.dev>,
	 Miguel Luis <miguel.luis@oracle.com>,
	 Joey Gouly <joey.gouly@arm.com>,
	 Christoph Paasch <cpaasch@apple.com>,
	 Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
	 Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>,
	 Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>,
	 Joel Granados <j.granados@samsung.com>,
	 Dawei Li <dawei.li@shingroup.cn>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	 Florent Revest <revest@chromium.org>,
	 David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>,
	 Stefan Roesch <shr@devkernel.io>,
	 Andy Chiu <andy.chiu@sifive.com>,
	 Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>,
	 Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,  Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>,
	 Zev Weiss <zev@bewilderbeest.net>,
	 Ondrej Mosnacek <omosnace@redhat.com>,
	 Miguel Ojeda <ojeda@kernel.org>,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org,
	 linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	Asahi Linux <asahi@lists.linux.dev>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64: Support the TSO memory model
Date: Tue, 07 May 2024 11:24:18 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87seythqct.fsf@draig.linaro.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20240411132853.GA26481@willie-the-truck> (Will Deacon's message of "Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:28:54 +0100")

Will Deacon <will@kernel.org> writes:

> Hi Hector,
>
> On Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 09:51:19AM +0900, Hector Martin wrote:
>> x86 CPUs implement a stricter memory modern than ARM64 (TSO). For this
>> reason, x86 emulation on baseline ARM64 systems requires very expensive
>> memory model emulation. Having hardware that supports this natively is
>> therefore very attractive. Such hardware, in fact, exists. This series
>> adds support for userspace to identify when TSO is available and
>> toggle it on, if supported.
>
> I'm probably going to make myself hugely unpopular here, but I have a
> strong objection to this patch series as it stands. I firmly believe
> that providing a prctl() to query and toggle the memory model to/from
> TSO is going to lead to subtle fragmentation of arm64 Linux userspace.
>
> It's not difficult to envisage this TSO switch being abused for native
> arm64 applications:
>
>   * A program no longer crashes when TSO is enabled, so the developer
>     just toggles TSO to meet a deadline.
>
>   * Some legacy x86 sources are being ported to arm64 but concurrency
>     is hard so the developer just enables TSO to (mostly) avoid thinking
>     about it.
>
>   * Some binaries in a distribution exhibit instability which goes away
>     in TSO mode, so a taskset-like program is used to run them with TSO
>     enabled.

These all just seem like cases of engineers hiding from their very real
problems. I don't know if its really the kernels place to avoid giving
them the foot gun. Would it assuage your concerns at all if we set a
taint flag so bug reports/core dumps indicated we were in a
non-architectural memory mode?

> In all these cases, we end up with native arm64 applications that will
> either fail to load or will crash in subtle ways on CPUs without the TSO
> feature. Assuming that the application cannot be fixed, a better
> approach would be to recompile using stronger instructions (e.g.
> LDAR/STLR) so that at least the resulting binary is portable. Now, it's
> true that some existing CPUs are TSO by design (this is a perfectly
> valid implementation of the arm64 memory model), but I think there's a
> big difference between quietly providing more ordering guarantees than
> software may be relying on and providing a mechanism to discover,
> request and ultimately rely upon the stronger behaviour.

I think the main use case here is for emulation. When we run x86-on-arm
in QEMU we do currently insert lots of extra barrier instructions on
every load and store. If we can probe and set a TSO mode I can assure
you we'll do the right thing ;-)

-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro

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