Re: [PATCH] watchdog: print all locks on a softlock

From: Frederic Weisbecker
Date: Thu May 01 2014 - 16:44:06 EST


2014-05-01 22:09 GMT+02:00 Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 03:17:20PM -0400, Don Zickus wrote:
>> On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 02:55:35PM -0400, Eric Paris wrote:
>> > If the CPU hits a softlockup this patch will also have it print the
>> > information about all locks being held on the system. This might help
>> > determine if a lock is being held too long leading to this problem.
>>
>> I am not sure this helps you. A softlockup is the result of pre-emption
>> disabled, ie the scheduler not being called after 60 seconds. Holding a
>> lock does not disable pre-emption usually. So I don't think this is going
>> to add anything.
>>
>> Are you trying to debug a hung task? The the hung_task thread checks to
>> see if a task hasn't scheduled in 2 minutes or so. That could be the
>> result of long lock (but that output already dumps the lockdep stuff).
>
> There may be some deadlocks that lockdep doesn't detect yet. 2 example:
>
> 1) spinlock <-> IPI dependency
>
>
> CPU 0 CPU 1
> --------------------------------------------------------
> spin_lock_irq(A)
> smp_send_function_single_async(CPU 1, func)
> //IPI
> func {
> spin_lock(1)
> }
>
> But this should be resolved with a virtual lock on the IPI functions.
> I should try that.

So actually this one above shouldn't be a problem because the _async
version doesn't wait for the IPI to complete. But the below still
looks possible.

>
> 2) rwlock <-> IPI
>
> CPU 0 CPU 1
> --------------------------------------------------------
> read_lock(A)
> write_lock_irq(A)
> smp_send_function_single(CPU 1, func)
> //IPI never happens
>
> This one is much trickier.
>
> Anyway those are the only scenario I know of but there may be more. When possible
> we want to extend lockdep to detect new scenarios of deadlock but we don't have the
> guarantee that it can detect everything.
>
> So, could be useful...
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