[PATCH] ia64: race flushing icache in COW path

There is a race condition that showed up in a threaded JIT environment.
The situation is that a process with a JIT code page forks, so the page is
marked read-only, then some threads are created in the child.  One of the
threads attempts to add a new code block to the JIT page, so a
copy-on-write fault is taken, and the kernel allocates a new page, copies
the data, installs the new pte, and then calls lazy_mmu_prot_update() to
flush caches to make sure that the icache and dcache are in sync.
Unfortunately, the other thread runs right after the new pte is installed,
but before the caches have been flushed.  It tries to execute some old JIT
code that was already in this page, but it sees some garbage in the i-cache
from the previous users of the new physical page.

Fix: we must make the caches consistent before installing the pte.  This is
an ia64 only fix because lazy_mmu_prot_update() is a no-op on all other
architectures.

Signed-off-by: Anil Keshavamurthy <anil.s.keshavamurthy@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
1 file changed