• Paul E. McKenney's avatar
    rcu: Make callers awaken grace-period kthread · 48a7639c
    Paul E. McKenney authored
    The rcu_start_gp_advanced() function currently uses irq_work_queue()
    to defer wakeups of the RCU grace-period kthread.  This deferring
    is necessary to avoid RCU-scheduler deadlocks involving the rcu_node
    structure's lock, meaning that RCU cannot call any of the scheduler's
    wake-up functions while holding one of these locks.
    
    Unfortunately, the second and subsequent calls to irq_work_queue() are
    ignored, and the first call will be ignored (aside from queuing the work
    item) if the scheduler-clock tick is turned off.  This is OK for many
    uses, especially those where irq_work_queue() is called from an interrupt
    or softirq handler, because in those cases the scheduler-clock-tick state
    will be re-evaluated, which will turn the scheduler-clock tick back on.
    On the next tick, any deferred work will then be processed.
    
    However, this strategy does not always work for RCU, which can be invoked
    at process level from idle CPUs.  In this case, the tick might never
    be turned back on, indefinitely defering a grace-period start request.
    Note that the RCU CPU stall detector cannot see this condition, because
    there is no RCU grace period in progress.  Therefore, we can (and do!)
    see long tens-of-seconds stalls in grace-period handling.  In theory,
    we could see a full grace-period hang, but rcutorture testing to date
    has seen only the tens-of-seconds stalls.  Event tracing demonstrates
    that irq_work_queue() is being called repeatedly to no effect during
    these stalls: The "newreq" event appears repeatedly from a task that is
    not one of the grace-period kthreads.
    
    In theory, irq_work_queue() might be fixed to avoid this sort of issue,
    but RCU's requirements are unusual and it is quite straightforward to pass
    wake-up responsibility up through RCU's call chain, so that the wakeup
    happens when the offending locks are released.
    
    This commit therefore makes this change.  The rcu_start_gp_advanced(),
    rcu_start_future_gp(), rcu_accelerate_cbs(), rcu_advance_cbs(),
    __note_gp_changes(), and rcu_start_gp() functions now return a boolean
    which indicates when a wake-up is needed.  A new rcu_gp_kthread_wake()
    does the wakeup when it is necessary and safe to do so: No self-wakes,
    no wake-ups if the ->gp_flags field indicates there is no need (as in
    someone else did the wake-up before we got around to it), and no wake-ups
    before the grace-period kthread has been created.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
    Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarJosh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
    48a7639c
tree.h 23.8 KB