Re: Regression: Failed boots bisected to 4cd13c21b207 "softirq: Let ksoftirqd do its job"

[Brian Starkey]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 10:49:06AM -0800, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 10:01 AM, Brian Starkey <brian.starkey@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > The smc91x driver does seem to have some trickiness around softirqs.
> > I'm not familiar with net drivers, but I'll see if I can figure
> > anything out there.
>
> Oh this code looks ugly :(
>
> Do you have CONFIG_SMP=y or not ?

Yeah CONFIG_SMP=y (and CONFIG_PREEMPT=y too, fwiw).

I did try forcing it into the no-op locking (as though config SMP
wasn't set), it didn't help (and it doesn't look like that would be
safe with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y either).

The bit in smc_hardware_send_pkt looks like skipping softirq
invocation when there's already one running wouldn't give the same
behaviour as before:

	if (!smc_special_trylock(&lp->lock, flags)) {
		netif_stop_queue(dev);
		tasklet_schedule(&lp->tx_task);
		return;
	}

... that said, I've no idea if that matters.

Of course I also don't know if the network driver is even to blame :-(

Cheers,
-Brian