[LTP] [PATCH 1/2] [mtest06] Fix race condition with signal handling

[Cyril Hrubis]

Hi!
> > I would also like to mention that we need to use locking at least when
> > the address computation and actual access to it is happening:
> > 
> > read thread                                          write thread
> > <compute and load address based on active mapping>
> >                                                      unmap()
> > <access address thinking it should be mapped>
> > <unexpected SIGSEGV>
> > 
> > There should be no issues with leaving out locking for the other parts
> > of code, but I found no feasible way to get around this one.
> 
> The idea me and Veronika were dicussing off-list was using just
> pthread_mutex_trylock() without actual blocking to avoid race above.
> 
> > 
> > I'd be happy to hear any feedback or different ideas how to tackle both
> > issues if anybody has them.
> 
> I don't see problem using 2 pages.
> I'd drop '-s' parameter until there's need for it.

Agreed.

> I'd try some minimal locking and measure how many iterations
> are we able to do now vs. before.

Sounds reasonable.

I guess that it's impossible to make it 100% correct without any
locking, so we should make it as lightweight as possible, maybe some
spinlocks atomic operations and sched_yield().

I was thinking of doing pthread_kill() to the reading thread with some
other signal that would flip a flag in the signal handler before we
unmap and after we map the memory, so we will use that signal as a some
kind of barrier. But this may be tricky to get working and quite
possibly will not work at all.

> ---
> Thinking loud about alternatives:
> 
> Signal handler could be replaced with write() to some temporary
> file, which would use the ptr to mapped/unmapped area. If it's
> not mapped we get EFAULT. This would also eliminate setjmp()/longjmp().

I wonder if we should actually test both, but yes handling EFAULT would
make this much easier than asynchronous signal delivery. On the other
hand the signal handler code is much more complex so there is probably
bigger room for triggering bugs.

> If we stop looking at mapped status and only consider mapped data,
> then this would turn into checking written pattern:
> 1) create file A with some pattern
> 2) thread1 maps/unmaps file into memory at X
> 3) thread2 writes to file B, from memory X, this will either work or fail with EFAULT
> 4) report PASS if all blocks in file B have same pattern as blocks in file A

And thread2 retries on EFAULT with the same address again, right? This
sounds interesting enough to be implemented as a test.

> To address "read between mmap/munmap must succeed", there would probably also
> need to be a write performed by thread1 to file C.

But that runs synchronously between the mmap() and unmap() right? That
kind of misses the point of the original test, however I wonder how
important it is anyway. If one thread maps/unmaps memory the other
threads has to be synchronized with mutexes anyway. So maybe it makes
sense to test for this assertion with heavy locking in a separate test.

-- 
Cyril Hrubis
chrubis@suse.cz