linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] rcu: Make jiffies_till_sched

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Date:   Fri, 19 Jul 2019 12:57:28 -0700
From:   "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.ibm.com>
To:     Byungchul Park <max.byungchul.park@...il.com>
Cc:     Joel Fernandes <joel@...lfernandes.org>,
        Byungchul Park <byungchul.park@....com>,
        rcu <rcu@...r.kernel.org>, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        kernel-team@....com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] rcu: Make jiffies_till_sched_qs writable

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 06:57:58PM +0900, Byungchul Park wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 4:43 PM Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@...ux.ibm.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 08:52:52PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 8:40 PM Byungchul Park <byungchul.park@....com> wrote:
> > > [snip]
> > > > > - There is a bug in the CPU stopper machinery itself preventing it
> > > > > from scheduling the stopper on Y. Even though Y is not holding up the
> > > > > grace period.
> > > >
> > > > Or any thread on Y is busy with preemption/irq disabled preventing the
> > > > stopper from being scheduled on Y.
> > > >
> > > > Or something is stuck in ttwu() to wake up the stopper on Y due to any
> > > > scheduler locks such as pi_lock or rq->lock or something.
> > > >
> > > > I think what you mentioned can happen easily.
> > > >
> > > > Basically we would need information about preemption/irq disabled
> > > > sections on Y and scheduler's current activity on every cpu at that time.
> > >
> > > I think all that's needed is an NMI backtrace on all CPUs. An ARM we
> > > don't have NMI solutions and only IPI or interrupt based backtrace
> > > works which should at least catch and the preempt disable and softirq
> > > disable cases.
> >
> > True, though people with systems having hundreds of CPUs might not
> > thank you for forcing an NMI backtrace on each of them.  Is it possible
> > to NMI only the ones that are holding up the CPU stopper?
> 
> What a good idea! I think it's possible!
> 
> But we need to think about the case NMI doesn't work when the
> holding-up was caused by IRQ disabled.
> 
> Though it's just around the corner of weekend, I will keep thinking
> on it during weekend!

Very good!

							Thanx, Paul

> Thanks,
> Byungchul
> 
> >                                                         Thanx, Paul
> >
> > > But yeah I don't see why just the stacks of those CPUs that are
> > > blocking the CPU X would not suffice for the trivial cases where a
> > > piece of misbehaving code disable interrupts / preemption and
> > > prevented the stopper thread from executing.
> > >
> > > May be once the test case is ready (no rush!) , then it will be more
> > > clear what can help.
> > >
> > > J.
> > >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Thanks,
> Byungchul
>