[ Upstream commit f186ce61 ]

It looks like this:

Message from syslogd@flamingo at Apr 26 00:45:00 ...
 kernel:unregister_netdevice: waiting for lo to become free. Usage count = 4

They seem to coincide with net namespace teardown.

The message is emitted by netdev_wait_allrefs().

Forced a kdump in netdev_run_todo, but found that the refcount on the lo
device was already 0 at the time we got to the panic.

Used bcc to check the blocking in netdev_run_todo.  The only places
where we're off cpu there are in the rcu_barrier() and msleep() calls.
That behavior is expected.  The msleep time coincides with the amount of
time we spend waiting for the refcount to reach zero; the rcu_barrier()
wait times are not excessive.

After looking through the list of callbacks that the netdevice notifiers
invoke in this path, it appears that the dst_dev_event is the most
interesting.  The dst_ifdown path places a hold on the loopback_dev as
part of releasing the dev associated with the original dst cache entry.
Most of our notifier callbacks are straight-forward, but this one a)
looks complex, and b) places a hold on the network interface in
question.

I constructed a new bcc script that watches various events in the
liftime of a dst cache entry.  Note that dst_ifdown will take a hold on
the loopback device until the invalidated dst entry gets freed.

[      __dst_free] on DST: ffff883ccabb7900 IF tap1008300eth0 invoked at 1282115677036183
    __dst_free
    rcu_nocb_kthread
    kthread
    ret_from_fork
Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>