Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 16:50:51 +0200 (CEST)
From: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
X-Sender: andrea@inspiron.random
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
X-GnuPG-Key-URL: http://e-mind.com/~andrea/aa.gnupg.asc
Hi Leonard,
this night I (hopefully) finally spotted and fixed a longstanding deadlock
that was hitting us on heavily loaded server running the DAC960.
The bug is present also in the earlier 2.2.x and 2.4.x and it's _not_ been
introduced with the DAC960 updates in 2.2.17.
In 2.4.x the SMP deadlock can't trigger because of two reasons:
1) the waitqueue uses a per-queue spinlock and the driver always wakeup
the waitqueue with the io_request_lock acquired
2) the waitqueue lock in 2.4.x at the moment is a spinlock_t (thus
there isn't a __cli-less read_lock (no-irqsave) wake_up).
The bug triggers in 2.2.x because the waitqueue_lock is shard by all
waitqueues and the wake_up uses a read_lock (that can be interrupted by
irq handlers that can later spin on the io_request_lock).
The SMP locking rule that was not enforced by the driver and that was
causing the deadlock is:
"never run add_wait_queue with the io_request_lock acquired"
The reason of the rule is that the irq_request_lock can be acquired by
interrupt handlers as well.
The patch with a description of the problem is here:
I recommend adding the above fix to 2.2.18pre3.
Andrea
I tried retrieving that file but was unsuccessful; is that the correct URL?
As for the comments above, I expect you are right. I had originally used a
much simpler sleep_on implementation until Manfred Spraul pointed out an SMP
problem with that and suggested the alternative sequence the driver now uses.
Looking at DAC960_WaitForRequest, we have:
WaitQueue_T WaitQueueEntry = { current, NULL };
add_wait_queue(&Controller->CommandWaitQueue, &WaitQueueEntry);
current->state = TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE;
spin_unlock(&io_request_lock);
schedule();
current->state = TASK_RUNNING;
remove_wait_queue(&Controller->CommandWaitQueue, &WaitQueueEntry);
spin_lock_irq(&io_request_lock);
Is the fix simply moving the spin_unlock right before the call to
add_wait_queue?
I should be able to release a new driver very shortly with such a fix; I just
have one or two other minor nits I'm finishing up.
Leonard
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 07 2000 - 21:00:30 EST