Re: mm, vmstat: kernel BUG at mm/vmstat.c:1408!

[Christoph Lameter]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2016, Michal Hocko wrote:

> On Wed 20-01-16 09:55:22, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> [...]
> > Subject: vmstat: Remove BUG_ON from vmstat_update
> >
> > If we detect that there is nothing to do just set the flag and do not check
> > if it was already set before. Races really do not matter. If the flag is
> > set by any code then the shepherd will start dealing with the situation
> > and reenable the vmstat workers when necessary again.
> >
> > Concurrent actions could be onlining and offlining of processors or be a
> > result of concurrency issues when updating the cpumask from multiple
> > processors.
>
> Now that 7e988032 ("vmstat: make vmstat_updater deferrable again and
> shut down on idle) is merged the VM_BUG_ON is simply bogus because
> vmstat_update might "race" with quiet_vmstat. The changelog should
> reflect that. What about the following wording?

How can it race if preemption is off?

> Since 0eb77e988032 ("vmstat: make vmstat_updater deferrable again and
> shut down on idle") quiet_vmstat might update cpu_stat_off and mark a
> particular cpu to be handled by vmstat_shepherd. This might trigger
> a VM_BUG_ON in vmstat_update because the work item might have been
> sleeping during the idle period and see the cpu_stat_off updated after
> the wake up. The VM_BUG_ON is therefore misleading and no more
> appropriate. Moreover it doesn't really suite any protection from real
> bugs because vmstat_shepherd will simply reschedule the vmstat_work
> anytime it sees a particular cpu set or vmstat_update would do the same
> from the worker context directly. Even when the two would race the
> result wouldn't be incorrect as the counters update is fully idempotent.


Hmmm... the vmstat_update can be interrupted while running and the cpu put
into idle mode? If vmstat_update is running then the cpu is not idle but
running code. If this is really going on then there is other stuff wrong
with the idling logic.

> Fixes: 0eb77e988032 ("vmstat: make vmstat_updater deferrable again and
> shut down on idle")
> CC: stable # 4.4+

?? There has not been an upstream release with this yet.