Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3] monitor: let cur_mon be per-thread

[Markus Armbruster]

Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 05:17:32PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 04:37:48PM +0800, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> > On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 02:11:08PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote:
>> > > In the future the monitor iothread may be accessing the cur_mon as
>> > > well (via monitor_qmp_dispatch_one()).  Before we introduce a real
>> > > Out-Of-Band command, let's convert the cur_mon variable to be a
>> > > per-thread variable to make sure there won't be a race between threads.
>> > >
>> > > Note that thread variables are not initialized to a valid value when new
>> > > thread is created.  However for our case we don't need to set it up,
>> > > since the cur_mon variable is only used in such a pattern:
>> > > 
>> > >   old_mon = cur_mon;
>> > >   cur_mon = xxx;
>> > >   (do something, read cur_mon if necessary in the stack)
>> > >   cur_mon = old_mon;
>> > > 
>> > > It plays a role as stack variable, so no need to be initialized at all.
>> > > We only need to make sure the variable won't be changed unexpectedly by
>> > > other threads.
>> > > 
>> > > Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <address@hidden>
>> > > ---
>> > > v3:
>> > > - fix code style warning from patchew
>> > > v2:
>> > > - drop qemu-thread changes
>> > > ---
>> > >  include/monitor/monitor.h | 2 +-
>> > >  monitor.c                 | 2 +-
>> > >  stubs/monitor.c           | 2 +-
>> > >  tests/test-util-sockets.c | 2 +-
>> > >  4 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>> > 
>> > The Monitor object is not fully thread-safe, so although the correct
>> > cur_mon is now accessible, code may still be unsafe.  For example,
>> > monitor_get_fd(cur_mon, ...) is not thread-safe and must not be used by
>> > OOB commands.
>> 
>> IMHO things like monitor_get_fd() should only be called in QMP
>> context, so there should always be a monitor_qmp_dispatch_one() in the
>> stack already (no matter whether it is in main thread or the monitor
>> iothread), which means that cur_mon should have been setup.  So IMHO
>> it's a programming error if monitor_get_fd() is called without correct
>> cur_mon setup after this patch.
>
> The pointer value of cur_mon is not the issue, you have made that work
> correctly.  The problem is that some monitor.h APIs do not access the
> Monitor object in a thread-safe fashion.
>
> Two QMP commands executing simultaneously in the main loop thread and
> the monitor IOThread can hit race conditions.  The example I gave was
> the monitor_get_fd() API, which iterates and modifies the mon->fds
> QLIST without a lock.
>
> Please audit monitor.h and either make things thread-safe or document
> the thread-safety rules (e.g. "This function cannot be called from
> out-of-band QMP context").  This wasn't necessary before but now that
> you are adding multi-threading it is.

Code working with the current thread's monitor via thread-local cur_mon
is easier to analyze in some ways than code working with a Monitor *
parameter: the latter can interfere with some other thread's monitor,
and you may have to argue what values the parameter can take.

You might want to replace parameters by cur_mon in certain cases.

Funnily, the plan used to be the opposite.  Commit 376253ece48: "On the
mid or long term, those use case will be obsoleted so that [cur_mon] can
be removed again."