Re: Warning in worker_enter_idle()

From: Paul E. McKenney
Date: Mon May 07 2012 - 17:32:37 EST


On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 12:40:42PM -0700, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Paul.
>
> On Sun, May 06, 2012 at 08:38:14AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > The worker_enter_idle() is complaining that there all workers are idle,
> > but that there is work remaining:
> >
> > /* sanity check nr_running */
> > WARN_ON_ONCE(gcwq->nr_workers == gcwq->nr_idle &&
> > atomic_read(get_gcwq_nr_running(gcwq->cpu)));
> >
> > This is running on Power, .config attached. I must confess that I don't
> > see any sort of synchronization or memory barriers that would keep the
> > counts straight on a weakly ordered system. Or is there some clever
> > design constraint that prevents worker_enter_idle() from accessing other
> > CPUs' gcwq_nr_running variables?
>
> Workers are tied to global cpu workqueues (gcwqs). There's one gcwq
> per cpu and one unbound one, so yeah, workers access these counters
> under gcwq->lock. Atomic accesses to nr_running is depended on only
> while nr_idle is adjusted under gcwq->lock, so there shouldn't be a
> discrepancy there. Can you reproduce the problem? What was going on
> the system? Was CPU being brought up or down?

I was running rcutorture with CPU hotplug operations. It has happened
a couple of times on the .config that I attached, but never under any
of the other 13 .configs that I run.

Thanx, Paul

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