Re: [RFC 2/2] printk: Add more information about the printk caller

From: Sergey Senozhatsky
Date: Thu Sep 24 2020 - 20:54:06 EST


On (20/09/24 15:38), Petr Mladek wrote:
[..]
>
> Grrrr, I wonder why I thought that in_irq() covered also the situation
> when IRQ was disabled. It was likely my wish because disabled
> interrupts are problem for printk() because the console might
> cause a softlockup.

preempt_disable() can also trigger softlockup.

> in_irq() actually behaves like in_serving_softirq().
>
> I am confused and puzzled now. I wonder what contexts are actually
> interesting for developers. It goes back to the ideas from Sergey
> about preemption disabled, ...

Are we talking about context tracking for LOG_CONT or context on
the serial console and /dev/kmsg?

If the latter, then my 5 cents, is that something like preemptible(),
which checks

(preempt_count() == 0 && !irqs_disabled())

does not look completely unreasonable.

We had a rather OK context tracking in printk() before, but for a
completely different purpose:

console_may_schedule = !oops_in_progress &&
preemptible() &&
!rcu_preempt_depth();

We know that printk() can cause RCU stalls [0]. Tracking this part
of the context state is sort of meaningful.

Let's look at this from this POV - why do we add in_irq()/etc tracking
info? Perhaps because we want to connect the dots between printk() caller
state and watchdog reports. Do we cover all watchdogs? No, I don't think
so. RCU stalls, local_irq_disable(), preempt_disable() are not covered.

Do we have any technical reasons not to add those missing bits?

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/9/485

-ss