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Fix fence completion race in virtio-gpu worker#604

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aford173 wants to merge 1 commit intocontainers:stable-1.17.xfrom
aford173:upstream/fix-fence-race
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Fix fence completion race in virtio-gpu worker#604
aford173 wants to merge 1 commit intocontainers:stable-1.17.xfrom
aford173:upstream/fix-fence-race

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Summary

Fix an out-of-order fence completion race that causes the guest to hang intermittently during heavy GPU
rendering through vDRM/virtio-gpu.

When virglrenderer immediately retires fence N+1 (no GPU work) before the timeline thread signals fence N,
the unconditional insert() in the fence handler overwrites completed_fences[ring] from N+1 back to N.
The worker's process_fence() then sees N+1 > N and adds fence N+1 to the pending list, where it stays
forever — the retirement callback already fired and won't fire again.

The fix uses a max check so only strictly higher fence_ids update the map.

Discovered while bringing up vDRM GPU passthrough on an MT8196 Chromebook (Mali-G725 / Panthor). The hang
was reproducible with glmark2 after ~100K-1.5M frames during multi-pass rendering scenes (desktop blur,
terrain, refract). Simple apps like glxgears ran indefinitely.

Test plan

  • glmark2 full benchmark completes all 33 scenes without hanging (previously hung intermittently at heavy
    multi-pass scenes)
  • glxgears runs indefinitely (unchanged)
  • Score: 674 (MT8196/Mali-G725 via vDRM)

@slp
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slp commented Mar 25, 2026

/gemini review

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Code Review

This pull request refactors the virtio_gpu module to correctly handle out-of-order fence completions. Specifically, it updates the logic for completed_fences to ensure that the highest fence_id is always retained for each ring, preventing a lower fence_id from overwriting a higher one. The reviewer suggests a more concise implementation for this max logic using u64::max.

Comment on lines +212 to +214
if completed_fence.fence_id > *entry {
*entry = completed_fence.fence_id;
}

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medium

This logic can be expressed more concisely by using u64::max.

            *entry = (*entry).max(completed_fence.fence_id);

When fences complete out of order (e.g., an immediate-retire for fence
N+1 arrives before the timeline signal for fence N), the unconditional
insert() would overwrite the higher fence_id with the lower one. This
causes fence N+1 to appear incomplete forever, hanging the guest.

Use entry().or_insert() with a max check so only strictly higher
fence_ids update the completed_fences map.

Signed-off-by: Adam Ford <adam.ford@anodize.com>
@aford173 aford173 force-pushed the upstream/fix-fence-race branch from b862bb1 to b9ae63e Compare March 25, 2026 15:50
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2 participants