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From: Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@gmail.com>
To: paulmck@kernel.org
Cc: arnd@arndb.de, glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de,
	ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru, linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	mattst88@gmail.com, richard.henderson@linaro.org,
	torvalds@linux-foundation.org, viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk,
	Ulrich Teichert <krypton@ulrich-teichert.org>,
	Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] alpha: cleanups and build fixes for 6.10
Date: Mon, 13 May 2024 12:50:07 +0900	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <99765904-3f35-4c78-998e-b444a6ab90e4@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <a8241a71-2b7d-4be0-8772-5c3b40fb5302@paulmck-laptop>

On Sun, 12 May 2024 07:44:25 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 08:02:59AM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> On Sat, 2024-05-11 at 18:26 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
>> > And that breaks things because it can clobber concurrent stores to
>> > other bytes in that enclosing machine word.
>> 
>> But pre-EV56 Alpha has always been like this. What makes it broken
>> all of a sudden?
> 
> I doubt if it was sudden.   Putting concurrently (but rarely) accessed
> small-value quantities into single bytes is a very natural thing to do,
> and I bet that there are quite a few places in the kernel where exactly
> this happens.  I happen to know of a specific instance that went into
> mainline about two years ago.
> 
> So why didn't the people running current mainline on pre-EV56 Alpha
> systems notice?  One possibility is that they are upgrading their
> kernels only occasionally.  Another possibility is that they are seeing
> the failures, but are not tracing the obtuse failure modes back to the
> change(s) in question.  Yet another possibility is that the resulting
> failures are very low probability, with mean times to failure that are
> so long that you won't notice anything on a single system.

Another possibility is that the Jensen system was booted into uni processer
mode.  Looking at the early boot log [1] provided by Ulrich (+CCed) back in
Sept. 2021, I see the following by running "grep -i cpu":

>> > [1] https://marc.info/?l=linux-alpha&m=163265555616841&w=2

[    0.000000] Memory: 90256K/131072K available (8897K kernel code, 9499K rwdata, \
2704K rodata, 312K init, 437K bss, 40816K reserved, 0K cma-reserved) [    0.000000] \
random: get_random_u64 called from __kmem_cache_create+0x54/0x600 with crng_init=0 [  \
0.000000] SLUB: HWalign=64, Order=0-3, MinObjects=0, CPUs=1, Nodes=1 [    0.000000]
                                                     ^^^^^^

Without any concurrent atomic updates, the "broken" atomic accesses won't
matter, I guess.

        Thanks, Akira


  reply	other threads:[~2024-05-13  3:50 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <71feb004-82ef-4c7b-9e21-0264607e4b20@app.fastmail.com>
2024-05-10 21:19 ` [GIT PULL] alpha: cleanups and build fixes for 6.10 Arnd Bergmann
2024-05-10 21:40   ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-10 22:28     ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-05-11 18:49       ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-11 19:37         ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-05-11 20:08           ` Arnd Bergmann
2024-05-12  1:26             ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-05-12  6:02               ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-12 14:44                 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-05-13  3:50                   ` Akira Yokosawa [this message]
2024-05-13  4:03                     ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-05-13  6:28                       ` Arnd Bergmann
2024-05-13  9:26                     ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-13 16:52                     ` Ulrich Teichert
2024-05-13 21:44                       ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-13  7:10                   ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-12  6:17   ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-13 16:27   ` Linus Torvalds
2024-05-13 21:42     ` John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
2024-05-31  2:53       ` Maciej W. Rozycki
2024-05-13 17:05   ` pr-tracker-bot

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