Re: [BUG] cpu-hotplug: Can't offline the CPU with naughty realtimeprocesses

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Tue May 08 2007 - 20:48:19 EST


Satoru Takeuchi wrote:
At Tue, 8 May 2007 22:18:50 +0530,
Srivatsa Vaddagiri wrote:

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 04:16:06PM +0900, Satoru Takeuchi wrote:

Sometimes I wonder at prio_array. It has 140 entries(from 0 to 139),
and the meaning of each entry is as follows, I think.

+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+
| index | usage |
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+
| 0 - 98 | RT processes are here. They are in the entry |
| | whose index is 99 - sched_priority. |

From sched.h:

/*
* Priority of a process goes from 0..MAX_PRIO-1, valid RT
* priority is 0..MAX_RT_PRIO-1, and SCHED_NORMAL/SCHED_BATCH
* tasks are in the range MAX_RT_PRIO..MAX_PRIO-1.

so shouldn't the index for RT processes be 0 - 99, given that
MAX_RT_PRIO = 100?


However `man sched_priority' says...


Processes scheduled with SCHED_OTHER or SCHED_BATCH must
be assigned the static priority 0. Processes scheduled
under SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR can have a static priority
in the range 1 to 99. The system calls
sched_get_priority_min() and sched_get_priority_max() can
be used to find out the valid priority range for a
scheduling policy in a portable way on all POSIX.1-2001
conforming systems.


and see the kernel/sched.c ...


int sched_setscheduler(struct task_struct *p, int policy,
struct sched_param *param)
{
...
/*
* Valid priorities for SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR are
* 1..MAX_USER_RT_PRIO-1, valid priority for SCHED_NORMAL and
* SCHED_BATCH is 0.
*/
if (param->sched_priority < 0 ||
(p->mm && param->sched_priority > MAX_USER_RT_PRIO-1) ||
(!p->mm && param->sched_priority > MAX_RT_PRIO-1))
return -EINVAL;
if (is_rt_policy(policy) != (param->sched_priority != 0))
return -EINVAL;
...
}


So, if I want to set the rt_prio of a kernel_thread, we can't use this
entry unless set t->prio to 99 directly. I don't know whether we are
allowed to write such code bipassing sched_setscheduler(). In addition,
even if kernel_thread can use this index , I can't understand it's usage.
It can only be used by kernel, but its priority is LOWER than any real
time thread.

If the rule can be changed to the following...

+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+
| index | usage |
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+
| 0 | RT processes are here. Only kernel can use |
| | this entry. |
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+
| 1 - 99 | RT processes are here. They are in the entry |
| | whose index is 99 - sched_priority. |
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+
| 100 - 139 | Ordinally processes are here. They are in the |
| | entry whose index is (nice+120) +/- 5 |
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------+

... there will be an entry only used by kernel and its priority is HIGHER
than any user process, and I'll get happy :-)

We've seen the same problem with other stop_machine_run sites in the kernel.
module remove was one.

Reserving the top priority slot for stop machine (and migration thread, I
guess) isn't a bad idea.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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