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BPF programs detect recursion by doing atomic inc/dec on a per-cpu
active counter from the trampoline. Create two helpers for operations on
this active counter, this makes it easy to changes the recursion
detection logic in future.

This commit makes no functional changes.

Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yonghong.song@linux.dev>
Signed-off-by: Puranjay Mohan <puranjay@kernel.org>
@puranjaymohan puranjaymohan force-pushed the arm64_atomic_inc_fix branch 3 times, most recently from 8b608f1 to bb1ec3d Compare December 19, 2025 17:15
BPF programs detect recursion using a per-CPU 'active' flag in struct
bpf_prog. The trampoline currently sets/clears this flag with atomic
operations.

On some arm64 platforms (e.g., Neoverse V2 with LSE), per-CPU atomic
operations are relatively slow. Unlike x86_64 - where per-CPU updates
can avoid cross-core atomicity, arm64 LSE atomics are always atomic
across all cores, which is unnecessary overhead for strictly per-CPU
state.

This patch removes atomics from the recursion detection path on arm64 by
changing 'active' to a per-CPU array of four u8 counters, one per
context: {NMI, hard-irq, soft-irq, normal}. The running context uses a
non-atomic increment/decrement on its element.  After increment,
recursion is detected by reading the array as a u32 and verifying that
only the expected element changed; any change in another element
indicates inter-context recursion, and a value > 1 in the same element
indicates same-context recursion.

For example, starting from {0,0,0,0}, a normal-context trigger changes
the array to {0,0,0,1}.  If an NMI arrives on the same CPU and triggers
the program, the array becomes {1,0,0,1}. When the NMI context checks
the u32 against the expected mask for normal (0x00000001), it observes
0x01000001 and correctly reports recursion. Same-context recursion is
detected analogously.

Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yonghong.song@linux.dev>
Signed-off-by: Puranjay Mohan <puranjay@kernel.org>
@kernel-patches-daemon-bpf kernel-patches-daemon-bpf bot force-pushed the bpf-next_base branch 3 times, most recently from 5007636 to 0ac68c9 Compare December 22, 2025 01:02
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