Re: WARNING: possible circular locking dependency detected

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017, Byungchul Park wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 11:47 PM, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior
> <bigeasy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > We hold the sparse_irq_lock lock while waiting for the completion in the
> > CPU-down case and in the CPU-up case we acquire the sparse_irq_lock lock
> > while the other CPU is waiting for the completion.
> > This is not an issue if my interpretation of lockdep here is correct.
> 
> Hello Sebastian,
> 
> I think you parsed the message correctly.
> 
> The message is saying that, for example:
> 
> context A (maybe being up?)
> --
> lock(sparse_irq_lock) // wait for sparse_irq_lock in B to be released
> complete(st->done) // impossible to hit here
> 
> context B (maybe wanting to synchronize with the cpu being up?)
> --
> lock(sparse_irq_lock) // acquired successfully
> wait_for_completion(st->done) // wait for completion of st->done in A
> unlock(sparse_irq_lock) // impossible to hit here
> 
> I cannot check the kernel code at the moment.. I wonder if this scenario is
> impossible. Could you answer it?

Yes, it's impossible because cpu hotplug is globally serialized. So the cpu
down scenario cannot happen in parallel with the cpu up scenario.

Thanks,

	tglx