Re: latest -git: WARNING: at arch/x86/kernel/ipi.c:123 send_IPI_mask_bitmask+0xc3/0xe0()

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Thu Aug 21 2008 - 22:14:16 EST


Dave Jones wrote:
> > Hm. What you say is true, but this one in particular has nothing to do
> with oprofile! It has something to do with reading /dev/cpu/*/msr
> while hot-unplugging cpu1:
> > [<c011733e>] msr_read+0x6e/0xa0
> [<c01a87b4>] vfs_read+0x94/0x130
> > I wasn't using oprofile when this happened. So I think it should also
> be considered a separate issue. Though yes -- CPU hotplug in general
> tends to break a lot of things.

From my reading of the msr code, we check that the cpu is online in ->open,
but we never check it again, and also, we make no guarantees that it
won't go away before we ->read or even ->close it.

Would adding a get_cpu/put_cpu across the open/close solve this?
Peter?


A get_cpu/put_cpu across the whole open..close sequence would seem to be, ahem, rude, since userspace could hold it for an arbitrary amount of time (plus, there is no guarantee that they are invoked on the same CPU.)

The cpuid driver has the same problem, obviously.

get_online_cpus() and put_online_cpus() around the call to {rd,wr}msr_safe_on_cpu() should work; and the CPU hotplug documentation seems to claim that we can just disable preemption around those calls, which is exactly what get_cpu()..put_cpu() does, so I guess get_cpu()..put_cpu() here is fine. Now, the big question is: should this really be done in the MSR/CPUID drivers, or should it be done in
smp_call_function_single(), which is the generic code invoked by this?

It seems to be that doing it in smp_call_function_single() would be more correct as it's already protected by get_cpu()..put_cpu() and a cpu_online() test in there should not be expensive in comparison to the whole rest of the code.

You may want to see if this patch fixes the problem; it does *NOT* have the correct error behaviour (some of the intervening layers don't propagate errors), but it should make the fault go away.

-hpa

diff --git a/kernel/smp.c b/kernel/smp.c
index 782e2b9..f362a85 100644
--- a/kernel/smp.c
+++ b/kernel/smp.c
@@ -210,8 +210,10 @@ int smp_call_function_single(int cpu, void (*func) (void *info), void *info,
{
struct call_single_data d;
unsigned long flags;
- /* prevent preemption and reschedule on another processor */
+ /* prevent preemption and reschedule on another processor,
+ as well as CPU removal */
int me = get_cpu();
+ int err = 0;

/* Can deadlock when called with interrupts disabled */
WARN_ON(irqs_disabled());
@@ -220,7 +222,7 @@ int smp_call_function_single(int cpu, void (*func) (void *info), void *info,
local_irq_save(flags);
func(info);
local_irq_restore(flags);
- } else {
+ } else if ((unsigned)cpu < NR_CPUS && cpu_online(cpu)) {
struct call_single_data *data = NULL;

if (!wait) {
@@ -236,10 +238,12 @@ int smp_call_function_single(int cpu, void (*func) (void *info), void *info,
data->func = func;
data->info = info;
generic_exec_single(cpu, data);
+ } else {
+ err = -ENXIO; /* CPU not online */
}

put_cpu();
- return 0;
+ return err;
}
EXPORT_SYMBOL(smp_call_function_single);