Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: silence soft lockups from unlock_page

From: Chris Down
Date: Tue Jul 21 2020 - 10:17:54 EST


I understand the pragmatic considerations here, but I'm quite concerned about the maintainability and long-term ability to reason about a patch like this. For example, how do we know when this patch is safe to remove? Also, what other precedent does this set for us covering for poor userspace behaviour?

Speaking as a systemd maintainer, if udev could be doing something better on these machines, we'd be more than receptive to help fix it. In general I am against explicit watchdog tweaking here because a.) there's potential to mask other problems, and b.) it seems like the kind of one-off trivia nobody is going to remember exists when doing complex debugging in future.

Is there anything preventing this being remedied in udev, instead of the kernel?