linux/Documentation/ww-mutex-design.txt
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   1Wait/Wound Deadlock-Proof Mutex Design
   2======================================
   3
   4Please read mutex-design.txt first, as it applies to wait/wound mutexes too.
   5
   6Motivation for WW-Mutexes
   7-------------------------
   8
   9GPU's do operations that commonly involve many buffers.  Those buffers
  10can be shared across contexts/processes, exist in different memory
  11domains (for example VRAM vs system memory), and so on.  And with
  12PRIME / dmabuf, they can even be shared across devices.  So there are
  13a handful of situations where the driver needs to wait for buffers to
  14become ready.  If you think about this in terms of waiting on a buffer
  15mutex for it to become available, this presents a problem because
  16there is no way to guarantee that buffers appear in a execbuf/batch in
  17the same order in all contexts.  That is directly under control of
  18userspace, and a result of the sequence of GL calls that an application
  19makes.  Which results in the potential for deadlock.  The problem gets
  20more complex when you consider that the kernel may need to migrate the
  21buffer(s) into VRAM before the GPU operates on the buffer(s), which
  22may in turn require evicting some other buffers (and you don't want to
  23evict other buffers which are already queued up to the GPU), but for a
  24simplified understanding of the problem you can ignore this.
  25
  26The algorithm that the TTM graphics subsystem came up with for dealing with
  27this problem is quite simple.  For each group of buffers (execbuf) that need
  28to be locked, the caller would be assigned a unique reservation id/ticket,
  29from a global counter.  In case of deadlock while locking all the buffers
  30associated with a execbuf, the one with the lowest reservation ticket (i.e.
  31the oldest task) wins, and the one with the higher reservation id (i.e. the
  32younger task) unlocks all of the buffers that it has already locked, and then
  33tries again.
  34
  35In the RDBMS literature this deadlock handling approach is called wait/wound:
  36The older tasks waits until it can acquire the contended lock. The younger tasks
  37needs to back off and drop all the locks it is currently holding, i.e. the
  38younger task is wounded.
  39
  40Concepts
  41--------
  42
  43Compared to normal mutexes two additional concepts/objects show up in the lock
  44interface for w/w mutexes:
  45
  46Acquire context: To ensure eventual forward progress it is important the a task
  47trying to acquire locks doesn't grab a new reservation id, but keeps the one it
  48acquired when starting the lock acquisition. This ticket is stored in the
  49acquire context. Furthermore the acquire context keeps track of debugging state
  50to catch w/w mutex interface abuse.
  51
  52W/w class: In contrast to normal mutexes the lock class needs to be explicit for
  53w/w mutexes, since it is required to initialize the acquire context.
  54
  55Furthermore there are three different class of w/w lock acquire functions:
  56
  57* Normal lock acquisition with a context, using ww_mutex_lock.
  58
  59* Slowpath lock acquisition on the contending lock, used by the wounded task
  60  after having dropped all already acquired locks. These functions have the
  61  _slow postfix.
  62
  63  From a simple semantics point-of-view the _slow functions are not strictly
  64  required, since simply calling the normal ww_mutex_lock functions on the
  65  contending lock (after having dropped all other already acquired locks) will
  66  work correctly. After all if no other ww mutex has been acquired yet there's
  67  no deadlock potential and hence the ww_mutex_lock call will block and not
  68  prematurely return -EDEADLK. The advantage of the _slow functions is in
  69  interface safety:
  70  - ww_mutex_lock has a __must_check int return type, whereas ww_mutex_lock_slow
  71    has a void return type. Note that since ww mutex code needs loops/retries
  72    anyway the __must_check doesn't result in spurious warnings, even though the
  73    very first lock operation can never fail.
  74  - When full debugging is enabled ww_mutex_lock_slow checks that all acquired
  75    ww mutex have been released (preventing deadlocks) and makes sure that we
  76    block on the contending lock (preventing spinning through the -EDEADLK
  77    slowpath until the contended lock can be acquired).
  78
  79* Functions to only acquire a single w/w mutex, which results in the exact same
  80  semantics as a normal mutex. This is done by calling ww_mutex_lock with a NULL
  81  context.
  82
  83  Again this is not strictly required. But often you only want to acquire a
  84  single lock in which case it's pointless to set up an acquire context (and so
  85  better to avoid grabbing a deadlock avoidance ticket).
  86
  87Of course, all the usual variants for handling wake-ups due to signals are also
  88provided.
  89
  90Usage
  91-----
  92
  93Three different ways to acquire locks within the same w/w class. Common
  94definitions for methods #1 and #2:
  95
  96static DEFINE_WW_CLASS(ww_class);
  97
  98struct obj {
  99        struct ww_mutex lock;
 100        /* obj data */
 101};
 102
 103struct obj_entry {
 104        struct list_head head;
 105        struct obj *obj;
 106};
 107
 108Method 1, using a list in execbuf->buffers that's not allowed to be reordered.
 109This is useful if a list of required objects is already tracked somewhere.
 110Furthermore the lock helper can use propagate the -EALREADY return code back to
 111the caller as a signal that an object is twice on the list. This is useful if
 112the list is constructed from userspace input and the ABI requires userspace to
 113not have duplicate entries (e.g. for a gpu commandbuffer submission ioctl).
 114
 115int lock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx)
 116{
 117        struct obj *res_obj = NULL;
 118        struct obj_entry *contended_entry = NULL;
 119        struct obj_entry *entry;
 120
 121        ww_acquire_init(ctx, &ww_class);
 122
 123retry:
 124        list_for_each_entry (entry, list, head) {
 125                if (entry->obj == res_obj) {
 126                        res_obj = NULL;
 127                        continue;
 128                }
 129                ret = ww_mutex_lock(&entry->obj->lock, ctx);
 130                if (ret < 0) {
 131                        contended_entry = entry;
 132                        goto err;
 133                }
 134        }
 135
 136        ww_acquire_done(ctx);
 137        return 0;
 138
 139err:
 140        list_for_each_entry_continue_reverse (entry, list, head)
 141                ww_mutex_unlock(&entry->obj->lock);
 142
 143        if (res_obj)
 144                ww_mutex_unlock(&res_obj->lock);
 145
 146        if (ret == -EDEADLK) {
 147                /* we lost out in a seqno race, lock and retry.. */
 148                ww_mutex_lock_slow(&contended_entry->obj->lock, ctx);
 149                res_obj = contended_entry->obj;
 150                goto retry;
 151        }
 152        ww_acquire_fini(ctx);
 153
 154        return ret;
 155}
 156
 157Method 2, using a list in execbuf->buffers that can be reordered. Same semantics
 158of duplicate entry detection using -EALREADY as method 1 above. But the
 159list-reordering allows for a bit more idiomatic code.
 160
 161int lock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx)
 162{
 163        struct obj_entry *entry, *entry2;
 164
 165        ww_acquire_init(ctx, &ww_class);
 166
 167        list_for_each_entry (entry, list, head) {
 168                ret = ww_mutex_lock(&entry->obj->lock, ctx);
 169                if (ret < 0) {
 170                        entry2 = entry;
 171
 172                        list_for_each_entry_continue_reverse (entry2, list, head)
 173                                ww_mutex_unlock(&entry2->obj->lock);
 174
 175                        if (ret != -EDEADLK) {
 176                                ww_acquire_fini(ctx);
 177                                return ret;
 178                        }
 179
 180                        /* we lost out in a seqno race, lock and retry.. */
 181                        ww_mutex_lock_slow(&entry->obj->lock, ctx);
 182
 183                        /*
 184                         * Move buf to head of the list, this will point
 185                         * buf->next to the first unlocked entry,
 186                         * restarting the for loop.
 187                         */
 188                        list_del(&entry->head);
 189                        list_add(&entry->head, list);
 190                }
 191        }
 192
 193        ww_acquire_done(ctx);
 194        return 0;
 195}
 196
 197Unlocking works the same way for both methods #1 and #2:
 198
 199void unlock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx)
 200{
 201        struct obj_entry *entry;
 202
 203        list_for_each_entry (entry, list, head)
 204                ww_mutex_unlock(&entry->obj->lock);
 205
 206        ww_acquire_fini(ctx);
 207}
 208
 209Method 3 is useful if the list of objects is constructed ad-hoc and not upfront,
 210e.g. when adjusting edges in a graph where each node has its own ww_mutex lock,
 211and edges can only be changed when holding the locks of all involved nodes. w/w
 212mutexes are a natural fit for such a case for two reasons:
 213- They can handle lock-acquisition in any order which allows us to start walking
 214  a graph from a starting point and then iteratively discovering new edges and
 215  locking down the nodes those edges connect to.
 216- Due to the -EALREADY return code signalling that a given objects is already
 217  held there's no need for additional book-keeping to break cycles in the graph
 218  or keep track off which looks are already held (when using more than one node
 219  as a starting point).
 220
 221Note that this approach differs in two important ways from the above methods:
 222- Since the list of objects is dynamically constructed (and might very well be
 223  different when retrying due to hitting the -EDEADLK wound condition) there's
 224  no need to keep any object on a persistent list when it's not locked. We can
 225  therefore move the list_head into the object itself.
 226- On the other hand the dynamic object list construction also means that the -EALREADY return
 227  code can't be propagated.
 228
 229Note also that methods #1 and #2 and method #3 can be combined, e.g. to first lock a
 230list of starting nodes (passed in from userspace) using one of the above
 231methods. And then lock any additional objects affected by the operations using
 232method #3 below. The backoff/retry procedure will be a bit more involved, since
 233when the dynamic locking step hits -EDEADLK we also need to unlock all the
 234objects acquired with the fixed list. But the w/w mutex debug checks will catch
 235any interface misuse for these cases.
 236
 237Also, method 3 can't fail the lock acquisition step since it doesn't return
 238-EALREADY. Of course this would be different when using the _interruptible
 239variants, but that's outside of the scope of these examples here.
 240
 241struct obj {
 242        struct ww_mutex ww_mutex;
 243        struct list_head locked_list;
 244};
 245
 246static DEFINE_WW_CLASS(ww_class);
 247
 248void __unlock_objs(struct list_head *list)
 249{
 250        struct obj *entry, *temp;
 251
 252        list_for_each_entry_safe (entry, temp, list, locked_list) {
 253                /* need to do that before unlocking, since only the current lock holder is
 254                allowed to use object */
 255                list_del(&entry->locked_list);
 256                ww_mutex_unlock(entry->ww_mutex)
 257        }
 258}
 259
 260void lock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx)
 261{
 262        struct obj *obj;
 263
 264        ww_acquire_init(ctx, &ww_class);
 265
 266retry:
 267        /* re-init loop start state */
 268        loop {
 269                /* magic code which walks over a graph and decides which objects
 270                 * to lock */
 271
 272                ret = ww_mutex_lock(obj->ww_mutex, ctx);
 273                if (ret == -EALREADY) {
 274                        /* we have that one already, get to the next object */
 275                        continue;
 276                }
 277                if (ret == -EDEADLK) {
 278                        __unlock_objs(list);
 279
 280                        ww_mutex_lock_slow(obj, ctx);
 281                        list_add(&entry->locked_list, list);
 282                        goto retry;
 283                }
 284
 285                /* locked a new object, add it to the list */
 286                list_add_tail(&entry->locked_list, list);
 287        }
 288
 289        ww_acquire_done(ctx);
 290        return 0;
 291}
 292
 293void unlock_objs(struct list_head *list, struct ww_acquire_ctx *ctx)
 294{
 295        __unlock_objs(list);
 296        ww_acquire_fini(ctx);
 297}
 298
 299Method 4: Only lock one single objects. In that case deadlock detection and
 300prevention is obviously overkill, since with grabbing just one lock you can't
 301produce a deadlock within just one class. To simplify this case the w/w mutex
 302api can be used with a NULL context.
 303
 304Implementation Details
 305----------------------
 306
 307Design:
 308  ww_mutex currently encapsulates a struct mutex, this means no extra overhead for
 309  normal mutex locks, which are far more common. As such there is only a small
 310  increase in code size if wait/wound mutexes are not used.
 311
 312  In general, not much contention is expected. The locks are typically used to
 313  serialize access to resources for devices. The only way to make wakeups
 314  smarter would be at the cost of adding a field to struct mutex_waiter. This
 315  would add overhead to all cases where normal mutexes are used, and
 316  ww_mutexes are generally less performance sensitive.
 317
 318Lockdep:
 319  Special care has been taken to warn for as many cases of api abuse
 320  as possible. Some common api abuses will be caught with
 321  CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES, but CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING is recommended.
 322
 323  Some of the errors which will be warned about:
 324   - Forgetting to call ww_acquire_fini or ww_acquire_init.
 325   - Attempting to lock more mutexes after ww_acquire_done.
 326   - Attempting to lock the wrong mutex after -EDEADLK and
 327     unlocking all mutexes.
 328   - Attempting to lock the right mutex after -EDEADLK,
 329     before unlocking all mutexes.
 330
 331   - Calling ww_mutex_lock_slow before -EDEADLK was returned.
 332
 333   - Unlocking mutexes with the wrong unlock function.
 334   - Calling one of the ww_acquire_* twice on the same context.
 335   - Using a different ww_class for the mutex than for the ww_acquire_ctx.
 336   - Normal lockdep errors that can result in deadlocks.
 337
 338  Some of the lockdep errors that can result in deadlocks:
 339   - Calling ww_acquire_init to initialize a second ww_acquire_ctx before
 340     having called ww_acquire_fini on the first.
 341   - 'normal' deadlocks that can occur.
 342
 343FIXME: Update this section once we have the TASK_DEADLOCK task state flag magic
 344implemented.
 345