Auto merge of #3054 - Vanille-N:spurious-fail, r=RalfJung

Issue discovered in TB: spurious reads are not (yet) possible in a concurrent setting

We discovered a week ago that in general, the current model of TB does not allow spurious reads because although reads provably never invalidate other reads, they migh invalidate writes.

Consider the code
```rs
fn f1(x: &u8) {}
fn f2(y: &mut u8) -> &mut u8 { &mut *y }

let mut data = 0;
let _ = thread::spawn(|| {
    f1(&mut data)
};
let _ = thread::spawn(|| {
    let y = f2(&mut data);
    *y = 42;
});
```
of which one possible interleaving is
```rs
1: retag x (&, protect) // x: [P]Frozen
2: retag y (&mut, protect) // y: [P]Reserved, x: [P]Frozen
1: return f1 // x: [P]Frozen -> Frozen, y: [P]Reserved
2: return f2 // x: Frozen, y: [P]Reserved -> Reserved
2: write y // x: Disabled, y: Active
```
that does not have UB.

Assume enough barriers to force this specific interleaving, and consider that the compiler could choose to insert a spurious read throug `x` during the call to `f1` which would produce
```rs
1: retag x (&, protect) // x: [P]Frozen
2: retag y (&mut, protect) // y: [P]Reserved, x: [P]Frozen
1: spurious read x // x:  [P]Frozen, y: [P]Reserved -> [P]Frozen
1: return f1 // x: [P]Frozen -> Frozen, y: [P]Frozen
2: return f2 // x: Frozen, y: [P]Frozen -> Frozen
2: write y // UB
```
Thus the target of the optimization (with a spurious read) has UB when the source did not.

This is bad.

SB is not affected because the code would be UB as early as `retag y`, this happens because we're trying to be a bit more subtle than that, and because the effects of a foreign read on a protected `&mut` bleed outside of the boundaries of the protector. Fortunately we have a fix planned, but in the meantime here are some `#[should_panic]` exhaustive tests to illustrate the issue.

The error message printed by the `#[should_panic]` tests flags the present issue in slightly more general terms: it says that the sequence `retag x (&, protect); retag y (&mut, protect);` produces the configuration `C_source := x: [P]Frozen, x: [P]Reserved`, and that inserting a spurious read through `x` turns it into `C_target := x: [P]Frozen, y: [P]Reserved`.
It then says that `C_source` is distinguishable from `C_target`, which means that there exists a sequence of instructions applied to both that triggers UB in `C_target` but not in `C_source`.
It happens that one such sequence is `1: return f1; 2: return f2; 2: write y;` as shown above, but it is not the only one, as for example the interleaving `1: return f1; 2: write y;` is also problematic.
This commit is contained in:
bors 2023-09-19 15:46:28 +00:00
commit b0d36cb6cb

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