linux-kernel - Re: regression 4.4: deadlock in with cgroup percpu

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Date:	Mon, 25 Jan 2016 09:49:42 +0100
From:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>
To:	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:	Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ibm.com>,
	Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@...ibm.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org >> Linux Kernel Mailing List" 
	<linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-s390 <linux-s390@...r.kernel.org>,
	KVM list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>, hch@....de
Subject: Re: regression 4.4: deadlock in with cgroup percpu_rwsem

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 06:03:13PM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > Yeah, it's hairy.  I wondered about adding support for bouncing to
> > workqueue in both percpu_ref and rcu which would make things easier to
> > follow.  Not sure how often this pattern happens tho.
> 
> This came up recently offlist for call_rcu(), so that a call to (say)
> call_rcu_schedule_work() would do a schedule_work() after a grace period
> elapsed, invoking the function passed in to call_rcu_schedule_work().
> There are several existing cases that do this, so special-casing it seems
> worthwhile.  Perhaps something vaguely similar would work for percpu_ref.

FYI, my use case was also related to percpu-ref.  The percpu ref API
is unfortunately really hard to use and will almost always involve
a work queue due to the complex interaction between percpu_ref_kill
and percpu_ref_exit.  One thing that would help a lot of callers would
be a percpu_ref_exit_sync that kills the ref and waits for all references
to go away synchronously.