• Tejun Heo's avatar
    bdi: Move cgroup bdi_writeback to a dedicated low concurrency workqueue · 67b46304
    Tejun Heo authored
    commit f1834646 upstream.
    
    From 0aa2e9b921d6db71150633ff290199554f0842a8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
    From: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
    Date: Wed, 23 May 2018 10:29:00 -0700
    
    cgwb_release() punts the actual release to cgwb_release_workfn() on
    system_wq.  Depending on the number of cgroups or block devices, there
    can be a lot of cgwb_release_workfn() in flight at the same time.
    
    We're periodically seeing close to 256 kworkers getting stuck with the
    following stack trace and overtime the entire system gets stuck.
    
      [<ffffffff810ee40c>] _synchronize_rcu_expedited.constprop.72+0x2fc/0x330
      [<ffffffff810ee634>] synchronize_rcu_expedited+0x24/0x30
      [<ffffffff811ccf23>] bdi_unregister+0x53/0x290
      [<ffffffff811cd1e9>] release_bdi+0x89/0xc0
      [<ffffffff811cd645>] wb_exit+0x85/0xa0
      [<ffffffff811cdc84>] cgwb_release_workfn+0x54/0xb0
      [<ffffffff810a68d0>] process_one_work+0x150/0x410
      [<ffffffff810a71fd>] worker_thread+0x6d/0x520
      [<ffffffff810ad3dc>] kthread+0x12c/0x160
      [<ffffffff81969019>] ret_from_fork+0x29/0x40
      [<ffffffffffffffff>] 0xffffffffffffffff
    
    The events leading to the lockup are...
    
    1. A lot of cgwb_release_workfn() is queued at the same time and all
       system_wq kworkers are assigned to execute them.
    
    2. They all end up calling synchronize_rcu_expedited().  One of them
       wins and tries to perform the expedited synchronization.
    
    3. However, that invovles queueing rcu_exp_work to system_wq and
       waiting for it.  Because #1 is holding all available kworkers on
       system_wq, rcu_exp_work can't be executed.  cgwb_release_workfn()
       is waiting for synchronize_rcu_expedited() which in turn is waiting
       for cgwb_release_workfn() to free up some of the kworkers.
    
    We shouldn't be scheduling hundreds of cgwb_release_workfn() at the
    same time.  There's nothing to be gained from that.  This patch
    updates cgwb release path to use a dedicated percpu workqueue with
    @max_active of 1.
    
    While this resolves the problem at hand, it might be a good idea to
    isolate rcu_exp_work to its own workqueue too as it can be used from
    various paths and is prone to this sort of indirect A-A deadlocks.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
    Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
    67b46304
backing-dev.c 27.9 KB