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futex: Update futex_wait_setup comments about locking
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Reviving a cleanup I had done about a year ago as part of a larger
futex_set_wait proposal. Over the years, the locking of the hashed
futex queue got improved, so that some of the "rare but normal" race
conditions described in comments can't actually happen anymore.

Signed-off-by: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Darren Hart <dvhltc@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <20110307020750.GA31188@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
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Michel Lespinasse authored and Thomas Gleixner committed Mar 10, 2011
1 parent a5abba9 commit 8fe8f54
Showing 1 changed file with 6 additions and 5 deletions.
11 changes: 6 additions & 5 deletions kernel/futex.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -1781,13 +1781,14 @@ static int futex_wait_setup(u32 __user *uaddr, u32 val, unsigned int flags,
*
* The basic logical guarantee of a futex is that it blocks ONLY
* if cond(var) is known to be true at the time of blocking, for
* any cond. If we queued after testing *uaddr, that would open
* a race condition where we could block indefinitely with
* any cond. If we locked the hash-bucket after testing *uaddr, that
* would open a race condition where we could block indefinitely with
* cond(var) false, which would violate the guarantee.
*
* A consequence is that futex_wait() can return zero and absorb
* a wakeup when *uaddr != val on entry to the syscall. This is
* rare, but normal.
* On the other hand, we insert q and release the hash-bucket only
* after testing *uaddr. This guarantees that futex_wait() will NOT
* absorb a wakeup if *uaddr does not match the desired values
* while the syscall executes.
*/
retry:
ret = get_futex_key(uaddr, flags & FLAGS_SHARED, &q->key);
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