We need to have a stronger barrier between releasing the lock and
checking for any waiting spinners. A compiler barrier is not sufficient
because the CPU's ordering rules do not prevent the read xl->spinners
from happening before the unlock assignment, as they are different
memory locations.
We need to have an explicit barrier to enforce the write-read ordering
to different memory locations.
Because of it, I can't bring up > 4 HVM guests on one SMP machine.
[ Code and commit comments expanded -J ]
[ Impact: avoid deadlock when using Xen PV spinlocks ]
Signed-off-by: Yang Xiaowei <xiaowei.yang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
smp_wmb(); /* make sure no writes get moved after unlock */
xl->lock = 0; /* release lock */
- /* make sure unlock happens before kick */
- barrier();
+ /*
+ * Make sure unlock happens before checking for waiting
+ * spinners. We need a strong barrier to enforce the
+ * write-read ordering to different memory locations, as the
+ * CPU makes no implied guarantees about their ordering.
+ */
+ mb();
if (unlikely(xl->spinners))
xen_spin_unlock_slow(xl);