Re: [PATCH] nohz: Fix missing tick reprog while interrupting inline timer softirq

[Frederic Weisbecker]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 09:01:02AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Aug 2018, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 05:57:06PM -0500, Grygorii Strashko wrote:
> > > This patch was back ported to the Stable linux-4.14.y and It causes regression -
> > >  flood of "NOHZ: local_softirq_pending" messages on all TI boards during boot (NFS boot):
> > > 
> > > [    4.179796] NOHZ: local_softirq_pending 2c2 in sirq 256
> > > [    4.185051] NOHZ: local_softirq_pending 2c2 in sirq 256
> 
> This printout is weird. Did you add something here?
> 
> > > the same is not reproducible with LKML - seems due to changes in tick-sched.c 
> > > __tick_nohz_idle_enter()/tick_nohz_irq_exit().
> > 
> > What changes do you think fixed this?
> > 
> > > I've generated backtrace from  can_stop_idle_tick() (see below) and seems this
> > > patch makes tick_nohz_irq_exit() call unconditional in case of nested interrupt:
> > > 
> > > gic_handle_irq
> > >  |- irq_exit
> > >     |- preempt_count_sub(HARDIRQ_OFFSET); <-- [1]
> > >     |-__do_softirq 
> > > 	<irqs enabled>
> > > 	|- gic_handle_irq()
> > > 	   |- irq_exit()
> > > 		|- tick_irq_exit()
> > > 		   if (!in_irq()) <-- My understanding is that this condition will be always true due to [1]
> 
> Correct, but that's not the problem. The issue is that this happens in a
> softirq disabled region. Does the below fix it?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 	tglx
> 
> 8<--------------------
> diff --git a/kernel/time/tick-sched.c b/kernel/time/tick-sched.c
> index 5b33e2f5c0ed..6aab9d54a331 100644
> --- a/kernel/time/tick-sched.c
> +++ b/kernel/time/tick-sched.c
> @@ -888,7 +888,7 @@ static bool can_stop_idle_tick(int cpu, struct tick_sched *ts)
>  	if (unlikely(local_softirq_pending() && cpu_online(cpu))) {
>  		static int ratelimit;
>  
> -		if (ratelimit < 10 &&
> +		if (ratelimit < 10 && !in_softirq() &&
>  		    (local_softirq_pending() & SOFTIRQ_STOP_IDLE_MASK)) {
>  			pr_warn("NOHZ: local_softirq_pending %02x\n",
>  				(unsigned int) local_softirq_pending());
> 
> 

Good catch! In 4.14 Rafael hadn't yet changed the path where we stop the idle tick.
We were still stopping it from irq exit and so we could do that while interrupting a
softirq. So we may need to backport this along with "nohz: Fix missing tick reprogram
when interrupting an inline softirq".