On 26.11.25 12:09, Andrew Cooper wrote:
On 26/11/2025 10:13 am, Jan Beulich wrote:
The lock-less list updating isn't safe against racing for_each_vcpu(),
unless done (by hardware) in exactly the order written.

Fixes: 3037c5a2cb82 ("arm: domain")
Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich <[email protected]>
---
The Fixes: tag is pretty arbitrary; the issue was becoming non-latent when
Arm support was added. (Strictly speaking IA-64 and PPC would have been
affected too afaict, just that now that doesn't matter anymore [or, for
PPC, not yet, seeing that its support is being re-built from scratch].)

I'm not quite happy about prev_id being plain int, but changing it to
unsigned (with suitable other adjustments) actually makes gcc15 generate
worse code on x86.

--- a/xen/common/domain.c
+++ b/xen/common/domain.c
@@ -464,6 +464,7 @@ struct vcpu *vcpu_create(struct domain *
              prev_id--;
          BUG_ON(prev_id < 0);
          v->next_in_list = d->vcpu[prev_id]->next_in_list;
+        smp_wmb();
          d->vcpu[prev_id]->next_in_list = v;
      }

Where's the matching smp_rmb()?  There needs to be one for this
smp_wmb() to be correct.

It's rather rhetorical, because clearly the smp_rmb() needs to be in
for_each_vcpu() given your commit message, but we obviously don't want
to do that.

This list can only be changed once during a VM's lifecycle, and even
then it only gets appended to.  i.e. this particular piece of logic to
splice a vCPU into the middle of a single linked list can be simplified
to the second assignment, as the first is always copying NULL.

This is not true for cpu hotplug: the associated idle vcpu will be inserted
at the appropriate place in the list.

The question is whether we call for_each_vcpu() for the idle domain at all.


Juergen

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