Re: 2.6.24-rc7 lockdep warning when poweroff

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 13:39 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > > To make sure now:
> > > 	same key - different name	- BAD
> > > 	same key - same name		- OK
> > > 	different key - same name	- OK
> > 
> > Strictly speaking one can do that, although I would recommend against it
> > - it leads to confusion as to which lock got into trouble when looking
> > at lockdep/stat output.
> 
> True, but I don't see a good way to avoid that. Similar things also
> happen with
> 
> 	mutex_init(&priv->mtx);
> 
> for example, no?

Yeah, it happens, I tend to 'fix' them when I encounter it though,
sometimes by just slightly altering the expression. It helps when
grepping the tree.

> > > mac80211 for example wants to allocate a (single-threaded) workqueue for
> > > each hardware that is plugged in and wants to call it by the hardware
> > > name.
> > 
> > Right, that would require a new key for each instance.
> 
> Except, how could I do that though? Keys are required to be static, so I
> can't have the object as the key. In any case, I don't think it matters
> much because the workqueues are per-hardware but all have similar users,
> I think that the other users here probably behave similarly.

Yeah, I think so too, but never underestimate the creativity of driver
authors:-)

> > > If you think the patch is a correct way to solve the problem I'll submit
> > > it formally and it should then be included in 2.6.24 to avoid
> > > regressions with the workqueue API (the workqueue lockup detection was
> > > merged early in 2.6.24.)
> > 
> > The patch looks ok, one important thing to note is that it means that
> > all workqueues instantiated by the same __create_workqueue() call-site
> > share lock dependency chains - I'm unsure if that might get us into
> > trouble or not.
> 
> It doesn't seem to have so far ;) I don't think it should. If some code
> allocates a per-instance workqueue that's much like having an inode lock
> or so.

We had to split up the inode lock to per filesystem classes, just
because the lock chains were conflicting between them...

> > Me and Ingo :-)
> 
> Alright, I'll write a patch description and send it in a minute.

Great, thanks for the effort.

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