PREEMPT_RT forbids certain operations like memory allocations (even with
GFP_ATOMIC) from atomic contexts. This is required because even with
GFP_ATOMIC the memory allocator calls into code pathes which acquire locks
with long held lock sections. To ensure the deterministic behaviour these
locks are regular spinlocks, which are converted to 'sleepable' spinlocks
on RT. The only true atomic contexts on an RT kernel are the low level
hardware handling, scheduling, low level interrupt handling, NMIs etc. None
of these contexts should ever do memory allocations.
As regular device interrupt handlers and soft interrupts are forced into
thread context, the existing code which does
spin_lock*(); alloc(GPF_ATOMIC); spin_unlock*();
just works.
In theory the BPF locks could be converted to regular spinlocks as well,
but the bucket locks and percpu_freelist locks can be taken from arbitrary
contexts (perf, kprobes, tracepoints) which are required to be atomic
contexts even on RT. These mechanisms require preallocated maps, so there
is no need to invoke memory allocations within the lock held sections.
BPF maps which need dynamic allocation are only used from (forced) thread
context on RT and can therefore use regular spinlocks which in turn allows
to invoke memory allocations from the lock held section.
To achieve this make the hash bucket lock a union of a raw and a regular
spinlock and initialize and lock/unlock either the raw spinlock for
preallocated maps or the regular variant for maps which require memory
allocations.
On a non RT kernel this distinction is neither possible nor required.
spinlock maps to raw_spinlock and the extra code and conditional is
optimized out by the compiler. No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200224145644.509685912@linutronix.de
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