Re: excessive kworker activity when idle. (was Re: vma corruption intoday's -git)

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Regardless, I'll put my money where my mouth is, and try to remove the
>> crazy re-flush thing.
>
> Yeah, that doesn't work. The tty does actually lock up when it fills
> up. So clearly we actually depended on that reflushing happening.
>
> That said, I do still think it's the right thing to do to remove that
> line, it just means that I need to figure out where the missing flush
> is.

Ok, that was unexpected.

So the reason for the need to do that crazy "try to flush from the
flush routine" is that in the case of "receive_room" going down to
zero (which only happens for n_tty and for the case of switching
ldisc's around), if we hit that during flushing, nothing will
apparently ever re-start the flushing when receive_room then opens up
again.

So instead of having that case re-start the flush, we end up saying
"ok, we'll just retry the flush over and over again", and essentially
poll for receive_room opening up. No wonder you've seen high CPU use
and thousands of calls a second.

The "seen_tail" case doesn't have that issue, because anything that
adds a new buffer to the tty list should always be flipping anyway. So
this attached patch would seem to work.

Not heavily tested, but the case that I could trivially trigger before
doesn't trigger for me any more. And I can't seem to get kworker to
waste lots of CPU time any more, but it was kind of hit-and-miss
before too, so I don't know how much that's worth..

The locking here is kind of iffy, but otherwise? Comments?

                     Linus
 drivers/tty/n_tty.c      |    6 ++++++
 drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c |    4 +---
 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/tty/n_tty.c b/drivers/tty/n_tty.c
index 428f4fe..0ad3288 100644
--- a/drivers/tty/n_tty.c
+++ b/drivers/tty/n_tty.c
@@ -95,6 +95,7 @@ static void n_tty_set_room(struct tty_struct *tty)
 {
 	/* tty->read_cnt is not read locked ? */
 	int	left = N_TTY_BUF_SIZE - tty->read_cnt - 1;
+	int old_left;
 
 	/*
 	 * If we are doing input canonicalization, and there are no
@@ -104,7 +105,12 @@ static void n_tty_set_room(struct tty_struct *tty)
 	 */
 	if (left <= 0)
 		left = tty->icanon && !tty->canon_data;
+	old_left = tty->receive_room;
 	tty->receive_room = left;
+
+	/* Did this open up the receive buffer? We may need to flip */
+	if (left && !old_left)
+		schedule_work(&tty->buf.work);
 }
 
 static void put_tty_queue_nolock(unsigned char c, struct tty_struct *tty)
diff --git a/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c b/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c
index b945121..f1a7918 100644
--- a/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c
+++ b/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c
@@ -442,10 +442,8 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work)
 			   line discipline as we want to empty the queue */
 			if (test_bit(TTY_FLUSHPENDING, &tty->flags))
 				break;
-			if (!tty->receive_room || seen_tail) {
-				schedule_work(&tty->buf.work);
+			if (!tty->receive_room || seen_tail)
 				break;
-			}
 			if (count > tty->receive_room)
 				count = tty->receive_room;
 			char_buf = head->char_buf_ptr + head->read;