Re: smp_call_function_single lockups

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 9:39 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Are there known errata for the x2apic?
>
> .. and in particular, do we still have to worry about the traditional
> local apic "if there are more than two pending interrupts per priority
> level, things get lost" problem?
>
> I forget the exact details. Hopefully somebody remembers.

I can't find it in the docs. I find the "two-entries per vector", but
not anything that is per priority level (group of 16 vectors). Maybe
that was the IO-APIC, in which case it's immaterial for IPI's.

However, having now mostly re-acquainted myself with the APIC details,
it strikes me that we do have some oddities here.

In particular, a few interrupt types are very special: NMI, SMI, INIT,
ExtINT, or SIPI are handled early in the interrupt acceptance logic,
and are sent directly to the CPU core, without going through the usual
intermediate IRR/ISR dance.

And why might this matter? It's important because it means that those
kinds of interrupts must *not* do the apic EOI that ack_APIC_irq()
does.

And we correctly don't do ack_APIC_irq() for NMI etc, but it strikes
me that ExtINT is odd and special.

I think we still use ExtINT for some odd cases. We used to have some
magic with the legacy timer interrupt, for example. And I think they
all go through the normal "do_IRQ()" logic regardless of whether they
are ExtINT or not.

Now, what happens if we send an EOI for an ExtINT interrupt? It
basically ends up being a spurious IPI. And I *think* that what
normally happens is absolutely nothing at all. But if in addition to
the ExtINT, there was a pending IPI (or other pending ISR bit set),
maybe we lose interrupts..

.. and it's entirely possible that I'm just completely full of shit.
Who is the poor bastard who has worked most with things like ExtINT,
and can educate me? I'm adding Ingo, hpa and Jiang Liu as primary
contacts..

                      Linus
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