rcu: Narrow early boot window of illegal synchronous grace periods

The current preemptible RCU implementation goes through three phases
during bootup.  In the first phase, there is only one CPU that is running
with preemption disabled, so that a no-op is a synchronous grace period.
In the second mid-boot phase, the scheduler is running, but RCU has
not yet gotten its kthreads spawned (and, for expedited grace periods,
workqueues are not yet running.  During this time, any attempt to do
a synchronous grace period will hang the system (or complain bitterly,
depending).  In the third and final phase, RCU is fully operational and
everything works normally.

This has been OK for some time, but there has recently been some
synchronous grace periods showing up during the second mid-boot phase.
This code worked "by accident" for awhile, but started failing as soon
as expedited RCU grace periods switched over to workqueues in commit
8b355e3bc140 ("rcu: Drive expedited grace periods from workqueue").
Note that the code was buggy even before this commit, as it was subject
to failure on real-time systems that forced all expedited grace periods
to run as normal grace periods (for example, using the rcu_normal ksysfs
parameter).  The callchain from the failure case is as follows:

early_amd_iommu_init()
|-> acpi_put_table(ivrs_base);
|-> acpi_tb_put_table(table_desc);
|-> acpi_tb_invalidate_table(table_desc);
|-> acpi_tb_release_table(...)
|-> acpi_os_unmap_memory
|-> acpi_os_unmap_iomem
|-> acpi_os_map_cleanup
|-> synchronize_rcu_expedited

The kernel showing this callchain was built with CONFIG_PREEMPT_RCU=y,
which caused the code to try using workqueues before they were
initialized, which did not go well.

This commit therefore reworks RCU to permit synchronous grace periods
to proceed during this mid-boot phase.  This commit is therefore a
fix to a regression introduced in v4.9, and is therefore being put
forward post-merge-window in v4.10.

This commit sets a flag from the existing rcu_scheduler_starting()
function which causes all synchronous grace periods to take the expedited
path.  The expedited path now checks this flag, using the requesting task
to drive the expedited grace period forward during the mid-boot phase.
Finally, this flag is updated by a core_initcall() function named
rcu_exp_runtime_mode(), which causes the runtime codepaths to be used.

Note that this arrangement assumes that tasks are not sent POSIX signals
(or anything similar) from the time that the first task is spawned
through core_initcall() time.

Fixes: 8b355e3bc140 ("rcu: Drive expedited grace periods from workqueue")
Reported-by: "Zheng, Lv" <lv.zheng@intel.com>
Reported-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Stan Kain <stan.kain@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Ivan <waffolz@hotmail.com>
Tested-by: Emanuel Castelo <emanuel.castelo@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Bruno Pesavento <bpesavento@infinito.it>
Tested-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Tested-by: Frederic Bezies <fredbezies@gmail.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 4.9.0-

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/rcu/tiny_plugin.h b/kernel/rcu/tiny_plugin.h
index 196f0302e2f4..c64b827ecbca 100644
--- a/kernel/rcu/tiny_plugin.h
+++ b/kernel/rcu/tiny_plugin.h
@@ -60,12 +60,17 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(rcu_scheduler_active);
 
 /*
  * During boot, we forgive RCU lockdep issues.  After this function is
- * invoked, we start taking RCU lockdep issues seriously.
+ * invoked, we start taking RCU lockdep issues seriously.  Note that unlike
+ * Tree RCU, Tiny RCU transitions directly from RCU_SCHEDULER_INACTIVE
+ * to RCU_SCHEDULER_RUNNING, skipping the RCU_SCHEDULER_INIT stage.
+ * The reason for this is that Tiny RCU does not need kthreads, so does
+ * not have to care about the fact that the scheduler is half-initialized
+ * at a certain phase of the boot process.
  */
 void __init rcu_scheduler_starting(void)
 {
 	WARN_ON(nr_context_switches() > 0);
-	rcu_scheduler_active = 1;
+	rcu_scheduler_active = RCU_SCHEDULER_RUNNING;
 }
 
 #endif /* #ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC */