Re: Device hang when offlining a CPU due to IRQ misrouting

From: Eric W. Biederman
Date: Fri Jun 01 2007 - 15:42:32 EST


"Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm seeing a driver hang with 2.6.22-rc3 while being slightly stupid
> about offlining CPUs. I suspect that this problem extends beyond a
> particular machine, as I've been able to replicate it with an IBM x3650
> and an IBM x3755. This is what I'm doing:
>
> 1) I tie an IRQ to a particular CPU via /proc/irq/XXX/smp_affinity (IRQ
> 4341 is the network card and we're picking on CPU1 in this example):
> echo 2 > /proc/irq/4341/smp_affinity
>
> 2) I then take CPU1 offline:
> echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
>
> 3) The kernel prints this:
> [ 1101.968040] Breaking affinity for irq 4341
> [ 1102.074019] CPU 1 is now offline
> [ 1102.081593] lockdep: not fixing up alternatives.
> [ 1112.886919] nfs: server 9.47.66.169 not responding, still trying
>
> After step 2 the system never sees interrupts from the network card and
> remains hung like that until CPU1 is brought back up. It looks as
> though the kernel is trying to reroute the IRQ (or so I'm assuming from
> the "Breaking affinity" message), but this doesn't ever happen, so the
> the kernel stops seeing interrupts from the device.
>
> Granted, one should not be offlining the CPU that is currently
> designated to handle an IRQ, but I suspect that the kernel ought at a
> minimum to reject the offlining or route the IRQ to any online CPU
> instead of screwing things up.

I agree.

> There exists a similar scenario. Set the IRQ affinity to a bunch of
> CPUs, watch /proc/interrupts to see which CPU is actually servicing the
> interrupts, then offline that CPU. The kernel does not reroute the IRQ
> to any of the other CPUs and the device also hangs.
>
> The furthest that I've dug is that it works on 2.6.17 and is broken in
> 2.6.22-rc3 and 2.6.21. Will git-bisect further, but I wanted to know if
> anyone else has seen this sort of problem. afaik, this seems to happen
> with both IOAPIC and MSI interrupts, possibly more.

Thanks for the bug report. I'm chuckling because I just submitted a
patch to count that whole code path as broken, based on code review.
It is trying to do something that the hardware can not reliably
accomplish.

Now I am surprised you were seeing this with MSI as well because
the hardware should theoretically work in that case. However the
irq_fixup code has enough issues that I wouldn't be surprised if
it was just doing something stupid and wrong.

Eric
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