linux-kernel - Re: Regression: Failed boots bisected to 4cd13c21b207 "softirq: Let ksoftirqd do its job"

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Date:   Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:33:51 +0000
From:   Brian Starkey <brian.starkey@....com>
To:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Cc:     Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Alexander Potapenko <glider@...gle.com>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@...utronix.de>
Subject: Re: Regression: Failed boots bisected to 4cd13c21b207 "softirq: Let
 ksoftirqd do its job"

Hi,

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 01:40:43AM +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>Brian,
>
>On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, Brian Starkey wrote:
>> No joy with this patch :-(
>>
>> I had to add an ioaddr argument because apparently that macro depends
>> on local context (yuck...), but it doesn't help my issue.
>>
>> FWIW I don't see any timeouts, either with or without the patch.
>> (I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the model of the
>> network card doesn't model whatever stall that loop is checking for.
>> It probably just completes all MMU operations immediately)
>
>Is there a chance that you enable trace points at the kernel command line?
>
>  trace_event=sched_wakeup,sched_switch,irq_handler_entry,irq_handler_exit,softirq_raise,softirq_entry,softirq_exit
>
>should be enough for a start. All we need aside of that is a trigger to
>stop the trace so we can actually see the events around the time where
>things go stale.
>
>I assume that the whole issue is visible throughout the slow progress of
>init towards a working system, so for a start it would be sufficient to add
>something like this into the startup sequence at some point:
>
> mount -t debugfs debugfs /sys/kernel/debug
> echo 0 >/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/tracing_on
>
>The only interesting challange is to get the trace data out of the
>system. The trace is accessible via:
>
> cat /sys/kernel/tracing/trace
>
>So if your ssh works at some point, that might be an option or you just try
>to store it over NFS (which will be slow, but better than nothing). Maybe
>you have a better idea :)

I finally managed to pry some traces out this morning. It seems like
the system struggles to even invoke echo when it's doing badly.

Trace before 4cd13c21b207: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8siaK6ZjvEwU21wNTdZS29kVXc
Trace after 4cd13c21b207: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8siaK6ZjvEwbXVzcnpieVkzWFU
(btw, if there's a preferred way to send the logs let me know. I
wasn't sure large or non-text attachments would be well received)

I'm not sure how much help the trace is, but it does look like the
system is spending far too much time in the ethernet device's IRQ
handler to be healthy.

Thanks,
Brian
>
>Thanks,
>
>	tglx
>