Re: Hotplug CPU printk issue

From: David Mosberger
Date: Thu May 26 2005 - 14:38:38 EST


>>>>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:52:04 -0700, Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx> said:

Andrew> Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> > Please confirm that we in fact do not want to allow downed CPUs to
>> > print things, then send a patch.
>> Yep. In the cpu hotplug case, per-cpu data possibly isn't initialized
>> even the system state is 'running'. As the comments say in the original
>> code, some console drivers assume per-cpu resources have been allocated.
>> radeon fb is one such driver, which uses kmalloc. After a CPU is down,
>> the per-cpu data of slab is freed, so the system crashed when printing
>> some info.

Andrew> hm, that certainly sounds sane, but I do recall there were
Andrew> reasonable-sounding reasons why the ia64 guys wanted
Andrew> printk-on-a-down-CPU to work. Hopefully David can remember
Andrew> what the problem was so we can find a more thorough fix.

I don't recall having submitted such a patch. According to the bk
log, it was Rusty who added the !system_running check (which was later
changed to system_state != SYSTEM_RUNNING).

The changelog only says:

"- Allow printk on down cpus once system is running"

Rusty?

--david
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