Re: 2.4.7 softirq incorrectness.

Andrea Arcangeli (andrea@suse.de)
Thu, 26 Jul 2001 20:29:39 +0200


On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 09:46:52PM +0400, kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru wrote:
> Hello!
>
> > At that time I checked loopback that runs under the bh so it's ok too.
>
> Well, it was not alone. I just looked at couple of places, when
> netif_rx was used. One is right, another (looping multicasts) is wrong. :-)
>
> So, is plain raising softirq and leaving it raised before return
> to normal context not a bug? If so, then no problems.
> The worst, which can happen is that it will work as earlier, right?

Depends what you mean with 'normal context'. If you mean 'userspace
context' then it is a bug, and in 2.4.5 we would been catching that case
in entry.S.

If there are lots of users of netif_rx outside bh or irq context I guess
this is the simpler way is:

--- 2.4.7/net/core/dev.c Sat Jul 21 00:04:34 2001
+++ 2.4.7aa1/net/core/dev.c Thu Jul 26 20:05:26 2001
@@ -1217,10 +1217,10 @@
enqueue:
dev_hold(skb->dev);
__skb_queue_tail(&queue->input_pkt_queue,skb);
+ local_irq_restore(flags);

/* Runs from irqs or BH's, no need to wake BH */
- __cpu_raise_softirq(this_cpu, NET_RX_SOFTIRQ);
- local_irq_restore(flags);
+ cpu_raise_softirq(this_cpu, NET_RX_SOFTIRQ);
#ifndef OFFLINE_SAMPLE
get_sample_stats(this_cpu);
#endif
@@ -1529,10 +1529,10 @@

local_irq_disable();
netdev_rx_stat[this_cpu].time_squeeze++;
+ local_irq_enable();

/* This already runs in BH context, no need to wake up BH's */
- __cpu_raise_softirq(this_cpu, NET_RX_SOFTIRQ);
- local_irq_enable();
+ cpu_raise_softirq(this_cpu, NET_RX_SOFTIRQ);

NET_PROFILE_LEAVE(softnet_process);
return;

> And we are allowed to yuild bhs at any point, when we desire. Nice.
>
> Actually, also I was afraid opposite thing: netif_rx was used to allow
> to restart processing of skb, when we were in wrong context or were afraid
> recursion. And the situation, when it is called with disabled irqs and/or
> raised spinlock_irq (it was valid very recently!), is undetectable.

It should be detectable with this debugging code (untested but trivially
fixable if it doesn't compile):

--- 2.4.7aa1/include/asm-i386/softirq.h.~1~ Wed Jul 25 22:38:08 2001
+++ 2.4.7aa1/include/asm-i386/softirq.h Thu Jul 26 20:22:28 2001
@@ -25,7 +25,11 @@
#define local_bh_enable() \
do { \
unsigned int *ptr = &local_bh_count(smp_processor_id()); \
+ unsigned long flags; \
\
+ __save_flags(flags); \
+ if (!(flags & (1 << 9))) \
+ BUG(); \
barrier(); \
if (!--*ptr) \
__asm__ __volatile__ ( \

> Actually, I hope such places are absent, networking core does not use
> irq protection at all, except for netif_rx() yet. :-)

I hope too :).

> > after netif_rx.
>
> But why not to do just local_bh_disable(); netif_rx(); local_bh_enable()?
> Is this not right?

That is certainly right. However it is slower than just doing if
(pending) do_softirq() after netif_rx().

Andrea
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