facd40aa5c
When reading group->parent without holding the group lock it is racy
against CPUs coming online the first time and thereby creating another
level of the hierarchy. This is not a problem when this value is read once
to decide whether to abort a propagation or not. The worst outcome is an
unnecessary/early CPU wake up. But it is racy when reading it several times
during a single 'action' (like activation, deactivation, checking for
remote timer expiry,...) and relying on the consitency of this value
without holding the lock. This happens at the moment e.g. in
tmigr_inactive_up() which is also calling tmigr_udpate_events(). Code relys
on group->parent not to change during this 'action'.
Update parent struct member description to explain the above only
once. Remove parent pointer checks when they are not mandatory (like update
of data->childmask). Remove a warning, which would be nice but the trigger
of this warning is not reliable and add expand the data structure member
description instead. Expand a comment, why it is safe to rely on parent
pointer here (inside hierarchy update).
Fixes: 7ee988770326 ("timers: Implement the hierarchical pull model")
Reported-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Signed-off-by: Anna-Maria Behnsen <anna-maria@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240716-tmigr-fixes-v4-1-757baa7803fe@linutronix.de
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.