There is a locking problem between different applications reading/writing to resctrlfs directory at the same time (read the patch below for details).
Suggest a standard locking scheme for applications to use. Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosa...@redhat.com> --- v2: Improve commentary about generality of locking problem ("Yu, Fenghua") Proper patch -p level (Thomas Gleixner) diff --git a/Documentation/x86/intel_rdt_ui.txt b/Documentation/x86/intel_rdt_ui.txt index d918d26..14b3214 100644 --- a/Documentation/x86/intel_rdt_ui.txt +++ b/Documentation/x86/intel_rdt_ui.txt @@ -212,3 +212,33 @@ Finally we move core 4-7 over to the new group and make sure that the kernel and the tasks running there get 50% of the cache. # echo C0 > p0/cpus + +4) Locking between applications + +Certain operations on the resctrl filesystem, composed of +read / writes to multiple files, must be atomic. + +As an example, the allocation of an exclusive reservation +of L3 cache involves: + + 1. read list of cbmmasks for each directory + 2. find a contiguous set of bits in the global CBM bitmask + that is clear in any of the directory cbmmasks + 3. create a new directory + 4. set the bits found in step 2 to the new directory "schemata" + file + +If two applications attempting to allocate space race with each other +(if two processes execute the steps above in a interlocked fashion), +they can end up using the same bits of CBMMASK, which renders the +reservations non-exclusive but shared. + +To coordinate atomic operations on resctrl and avoid the problem +above, the following locking procedure is recommended: + +A) open /var/lock/resctrl/fs.lock with O_CREAT|O_EXCL. +B) if success, write pid of program accessing the directory + structure to this file. +C) read/write the directory structure. +D) remove file. +