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

[Eric Dumazet]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 2:33 AM, Brian Starkey <brian.starkey@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 01:40:43AM +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>
>> Brian,
>>
>> On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, Brian Starkey wrote:
>>>
>>> No joy with this patch :-(
>>>
>>> I had to add an ioaddr argument because apparently that macro depends
>>> on local context (yuck...), but it doesn't help my issue.
>>>
>>> FWIW I don't see any timeouts, either with or without the patch.
>>> (I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the model of the
>>> network card doesn't model whatever stall that loop is checking for.
>>> It probably just completes all MMU operations immediately)
>>
>>
>> Is there a chance that you enable trace points at the kernel command line?
>>
>>  trace_event=sched_wakeup,sched_switch,irq_handler_entry,irq_handler_exit,softirq_raise,softirq_entry,softirq_exit
>>
>> should be enough for a start. All we need aside of that is a trigger to
>> stop the trace so we can actually see the events around the time where
>> things go stale.
>>
>> I assume that the whole issue is visible throughout the slow progress of
>> init towards a working system, so for a start it would be sufficient to add
>> something like this into the startup sequence at some point:
>>
>> mount -t debugfs debugfs /sys/kernel/debug
>> echo 0 >/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/tracing_on
>>
>> The only interesting challange is to get the trace data out of the
>> system. The trace is accessible via:
>>
>> cat /sys/kernel/tracing/trace
>>
>> So if your ssh works at some point, that might be an option or you just try
>> to store it over NFS (which will be slow, but better than nothing). Maybe
>> you have a better idea :)
>
>
> I finally managed to pry some traces out this morning. It seems like
> the system struggles to even invoke echo when it's doing badly.
>
> Trace before 4cd13c21b207: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8siaK6ZjvEwU21wNTdZS29kVXc
> Trace after 4cd13c21b207: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8siaK6ZjvEwbXVzcnpieVkzWFU
> (btw, if there's a preferred way to send the logs let me know. I
> wasn't sure large or non-text attachments would be well received)
>
> I'm not sure how much help the trace is, but it does look like the
> system is spending far too much time in the ethernet device's IRQ
> handler to be healthy.
>

Thanks a lot Brian

Can you confirm interrupt handler is smc911x_interrupt() ?

(ie : is SMC_USE_PXA_DMA / SMC_USE_DMA defined or not ?)


>
> Thanks,
> Brian
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>         tglx
>>