Tree RCU guarantees that every online CPU has a memory barrier between
any given grace period and any of that CPU's RCU read-side sections that
must be ordered against that grace period. Since RCU doesn't always
know where read-side critical sections are, the actual implementation
guarantees order against prior and subsequent non-idle non-offline code,
whether in an RCU read-side critical section or not. As a result, there
does not need to be a memory barrier at the end of synchronize_rcu()
and friends because the ordering internal to the grace period has
ordered every CPU's post-grace-period execution against each CPU's
pre-grace-period execution, again for all non-idle online CPUs.
In contrast, SRCU can have non-idle online CPUs that are completely
uninvolved in a given SRCU grace period, for example, a CPU that
never runs any SRCU read-side critical sections and took no part in
the grace-period processing. It is in theory possible for a given
synchronize_srcu()'s wakeup to be delivered to a CPU that was completely
uninvolved in the prior SRCU grace period, which could mean that the
code following that synchronize_srcu() would end up being unordered with
respect to both the grace period and any pre-existing SRCU read-side
critical sections.
This commit therefore adds an smp_mb() to the end of __synchronize_srcu(),
which prevents this scenario from occurring.
Reported-by: Lance Roy <ldr709@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Lance Roy <ldr709@gmail.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 4.12.x
35732cf9dd