From: "Steven Rostedt (Red Hat)" The tracepoint infrastructure uses RCU sched protection to enable and disable tracepoints safely. There are some instances where tracepoints are used in infrastructure code (like kfree()) that get called after a CPU is going offline, and perhaps when it is coming back online but hasn't been registered yet. This can probuce the following warning: [ INFO: suspicious RCU usage. ] 4.4.0-00006-g0fe53e8-dirty #34 Tainted: G S ------------------------------- include/trace/events/kmem.h:141 suspicious rcu_dereference_check() usage! other info that might help us debug this: RCU used illegally from offline CPU! rcu_scheduler_active = 1, debug_locks = 1 no locks held by swapper/8/0. stack backtrace: CPU: 8 PID: 0 Comm: swapper/8 Tainted: G S 4.4.0-00006-g0fe53e8-dirty #34 Call Trace: [c0000005b76c78d0] [c0000000008b9540] .dump_stack+0x98/0xd4 (unreliable) [c0000005b76c7950] [c00000000010c898] .lockdep_rcu_suspicious+0x108/0x170 [c0000005b76c79e0] [c00000000029adc0] .kfree+0x390/0x440 [c0000005b76c7a80] [c000000000055f74] .destroy_context+0x44/0x100 [c0000005b76c7b00] [c0000000000934a0] .__mmdrop+0x60/0x150 [c0000005b76c7b90] [c0000000000e3ff0] .idle_task_exit+0x130/0x140 [c0000005b76c7c20] [c000000000075804] .pseries_mach_cpu_die+0x64/0x310 [c0000005b76c7cd0] [c000000000043e7c] .cpu_die+0x3c/0x60 [c0000005b76c7d40] [c0000000000188d8] .arch_cpu_idle_dead+0x28/0x40 [c0000005b76c7db0] [c000000000101e6c] .cpu_startup_entry+0x50c/0x560 [c0000005b76c7ed0] [c000000000043bd8] .start_secondary+0x328/0x360 [c0000005b76c7f90] [c000000000008a6c] start_secondary_prolog+0x10/0x14 This warning is not a false positive either. RCU is not protecting code that is being executed while the CPU is offline. Instead of playing "whack-a-mole(TM)" and adding conditional statements to the tracepoints we find that are used in this instance, simply add a cpu_online() test to the tracepoint code where the tracepoint will be ignored if the CPU is offline. Use of raw_smp_processor_id() is fine, as there should never be a case where the tracepoint code goes from running on a CPU that is online and suddenly gets migrated to a CPU that is offline. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1455387773-4245-1-git-send-email-kda@linux-powerpc.org Reported-by: Denis Kirjanov Fixes: 97e1c18e8d17b ("tracing: Kernel Tracepoints") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v2.6.28+ Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt --- include/linux/tracepoint.h | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/include/linux/tracepoint.h b/include/linux/tracepoint.h index acd522a91539..acfdbf353a0b 100644 --- a/include/linux/tracepoint.h +++ b/include/linux/tracepoint.h @@ -14,8 +14,10 @@ * See the file COPYING for more details. */ +#include #include #include +#include #include #include @@ -132,6 +134,9 @@ extern void syscall_unregfunc(void); void *it_func; \ void *__data; \ \ + if (!cpu_online(raw_smp_processor_id())) \ + return; \ + \ if (!(cond)) \ return; \ prercu; \ -- 2.6.4