12 Dec, 2011

7 commits

  • The rcu_do_batch() function that invokes callbacks for TREE_RCU and
    TREE_PREEMPT_RCU normally throttles callback invocation to avoid degrading
    scheduling latency. However, as long as the CPU would otherwise be idle,
    there is no downside to continuing to invoke any callbacks that have passed
    through their grace periods. In fact, processing such callbacks in a
    timely manner has the benefit of increasing the probability that the
    CPU can enter the power-saving dyntick-idle mode.

    Therefore, this commit allows callback invocation to continue beyond the
    preset limit as long as the scheduler does not have some other task to
    run and as long as context is that of the idle task or the relevant
    RCU kthread.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • The current implementation of RCU_FAST_NO_HZ prevents CPUs from entering
    dyntick-idle state if they have RCU callbacks pending. Unfortunately,
    this has the side-effect of often preventing them from entering this
    state, especially if at least one other CPU is not in dyntick-idle state.
    However, the resulting per-tick wakeup is wasteful in many cases: if the
    CPU has already fully responded to the current RCU grace period, there
    will be nothing for it to do until this grace period ends, which will
    frequently take several jiffies.

    This commit therefore permits a CPU that has done everything that the
    current grace period has asked of it (rcu_pending() == 0) even if it
    still as RCU callbacks pending. However, such a CPU posts a timer to
    wake it up several jiffies later (6 jiffies, based on experience with
    grace-period lengths). This wakeup is required to handle situations
    that can result in all CPUs being in dyntick-idle mode, thus failing
    to ever complete the current grace period. If a CPU wakes up before
    the timer goes off, then it cancels that timer, thus avoiding spurious
    wakeups.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • With the new implementation of RCU_FAST_NO_HZ, it was possible to hang
    RCU grace periods as follows:

    o CPU 0 attempts to go idle, cycles several times through the
    rcu_prepare_for_idle() loop, then goes dyntick-idle when
    RCU needs nothing more from it, while still having at least
    on RCU callback pending.

    o CPU 1 goes idle with no callbacks.

    Both CPUs can then stay in dyntick-idle mode indefinitely, preventing
    the RCU grace period from ever completing, possibly hanging the system.

    This commit therefore prevents CPUs that have RCU callbacks from entering
    dyntick-idle mode. This approach also eliminates the need for the
    end-of-grace-period IPIs used previously.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Currently, RCU does not permit a CPU to enter dyntick-idle mode if that
    CPU has any RCU callbacks queued. This means that workloads for which
    each CPU wakes up and does some RCU updates every few ticks will never
    enter dyntick-idle mode. This can result in significant unnecessary power
    consumption, so this patch permits a given to enter dyntick-idle mode if
    it has callbacks, but only if that same CPU has completed all current
    work for the RCU core. We determine use rcu_pending() to determine
    whether a given CPU has completed all current work for the RCU core.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • When setting up an expedited grace period, if there were no readers, the
    task will awaken itself. This commit removes this useless self-awakening.

    Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Thomas Gleixner
     
  • Earlier versions of RCU used the scheduling-clock tick to detect idleness
    by checking for the idle task, but handled idleness differently for
    CONFIG_NO_HZ=y. But there are now a number of uses of RCU read-side
    critical sections in the idle task, for example, for tracing. A more
    fine-grained detection of idleness is therefore required.

    This commit presses the old dyntick-idle code into full-time service,
    so that rcu_idle_enter(), previously known as rcu_enter_nohz(), is
    always invoked at the beginning of an idle loop iteration. Similarly,
    rcu_idle_exit(), previously known as rcu_exit_nohz(), is always invoked
    at the end of an idle-loop iteration. This allows the idle task to
    use RCU everywhere except between consecutive rcu_idle_enter() and
    rcu_idle_exit() calls, in turn allowing architecture maintainers to
    specify exactly where in the idle loop that RCU may be used.

    Because some of the userspace upcall uses can result in what looks
    to RCU like half of an interrupt, it is not possible to expect that
    the irq_enter() and irq_exit() hooks will give exact counts. This
    patch therefore expands the ->dynticks_nesting counter to 64 bits
    and uses two separate bitfields to count process/idle transitions
    and interrupt entry/exit transitions. It is presumed that userspace
    upcalls do not happen in the idle loop or from usermode execution
    (though usermode might do a system call that results in an upcall).
    The counter is hard-reset on each process/idle transition, which
    avoids the interrupt entry/exit error from accumulating. Overflow
    is avoided by the 64-bitness of the ->dyntick_nesting counter.

    This commit also adds warnings if a non-idle task asks RCU to enter
    idle state (and these checks will need some adjustment before applying
    Frederic's OS-jitter patches (http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/7/246).
    In addition, validation of ->dynticks and ->dynticks_nesting is added.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • The ->signaled field was named before complications in the form of
    dyntick-idle mode and offlined CPUs. These complications have required
    that force_quiescent_state() be implemented as a state machine, instead
    of simply unconditionally sending reschedule IPIs. Therefore, this
    commit renames ->signaled to ->fqs_state to catch up with the new
    force_quiescent_state() reality.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     

29 Sep, 2011

5 commits

  • The purpose of rcu_needs_cpu_flush() was to iterate on pushing the
    current grace period in order to help the current CPU enter dyntick-idle
    mode. However, this can result in failures if the CPU starts entering
    dyntick-idle mode, but then backs out. In this case, the call to
    rcu_pending() from rcu_needs_cpu_flush() might end up announcing a
    non-existing quiescent state.

    This commit therefore removes rcu_needs_cpu_flush() in favor of letting
    the dyntick-idle machinery at the end of the softirq handler push the
    loop along via its call to rcu_pending().

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • It is possible for an RCU CPU stall to end just as it is detected, in
    which case the current code will uselessly dump all CPU's stacks.
    This commit therefore checks for this condition and refrains from
    sending needless NMIs.

    And yes, the stall might also end just after we checked all CPUs and
    tasks, but in that case we would at least have given some clue as
    to which CPU/task was at fault.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • There is often a delay between the time that a CPU passes through a
    quiescent state and the time that this quiescent state is reported to the
    RCU core. It is quite possible that the grace period ended before the
    quiescent state could be reported, for example, some other CPU might have
    deduced that this CPU passed through dyntick-idle mode. It is critically
    important that quiescent state be counted only against the grace period
    that was in effect at the time that the quiescent state was detected.

    Previously, this was handled by recording the number of the last grace
    period to complete when passing through a quiescent state. The RCU
    core then checks this number against the current value, and rejects
    the quiescent state if there is a mismatch. However, one additional
    possibility must be accounted for, namely that the quiescent state was
    recorded after the prior grace period completed but before the current
    grace period started. In this case, the RCU core must reject the
    quiescent state, but the recorded number will match. This is handled
    when the CPU becomes aware of a new grace period -- at that point,
    it invalidates any prior quiescent state.

    This works, but is a bit indirect. The new approach records the current
    grace period, and the RCU core checks to see (1) that this is still the
    current grace period and (2) that this grace period has not yet ended.
    This approach simplifies reasoning about correctness, and this commit
    changes over to this new approach.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Add trace events to record grace-period start and end, quiescent states,
    CPUs noticing grace-period start and end, grace-period initialization,
    call_rcu() invocation, tasks blocking in RCU read-side critical sections,
    tasks exiting those same critical sections, force_quiescent_state()
    detection of dyntick-idle and offline CPUs, CPUs entering and leaving
    dyntick-idle mode (except from NMIs), CPUs coming online and going
    offline, and CPUs being kicked for staying in dyntick-idle mode for too
    long (as in many weeks, even on 32-bit systems).

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    rcu: Add the rcu flavor to callback trace events

    The earlier trace events for registering RCU callbacks and for invoking
    them did not include the RCU flavor (rcu_bh, rcu_preempt, or rcu_sched).
    This commit adds the RCU flavor to those trace events.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Andi Kleen noticed that one of the RCU_BOOST data declarations was
    out of sync with the definition. Move the declarations so that the
    compiler can do the checking in the future.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     

17 Jun, 2011

1 commit

  • The commit "use softirq instead of kthreads except when RCU_BOOST=y"
    just applied #ifdef in place. This commit is a cleanup that moves
    the newly #ifdef'ed code to the header file kernel/rcutree_plugin.h.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     

16 Jun, 2011

1 commit


15 Jun, 2011

1 commit

  • Commit a26ac2455ffcf3(rcu: move TREE_RCU from softirq to kthread)
    introduced performance regression. In an AIM7 test, this commit degraded
    performance by about 40%.

    The commit runs rcu callbacks in a kthread instead of softirq. We observed
    high rate of context switch which is caused by this. Out test system has
    64 CPUs and HZ is 1000, so we saw more than 64k context switch per second
    which is caused by RCU's per-CPU kthread. A trace showed that most of
    the time the RCU per-CPU kthread doesn't actually handle any callbacks,
    but instead just does a very small amount of work handling grace periods.
    This means that RCU's per-CPU kthreads are making the scheduler do quite
    a bit of work in order to allow a very small amount of RCU-related
    processing to be done.

    Alex Shi's analysis determined that this slowdown is due to lock
    contention within the scheduler. Unfortunately, as Peter Zijlstra points
    out, the scheduler's real-time semantics require global action, which
    means that this contention is inherent in real-time scheduling. (Yes,
    perhaps someone will come up with a workaround -- otherwise, -rt is not
    going to do well on large SMP systems -- but this patch will work around
    this issue in the meantime. And "the meantime" might well be forever.)

    This patch therefore re-introduces softirq processing to RCU, but only
    for core RCU work. RCU callbacks are still executed in kthread context,
    so that only a small amount of RCU work runs in softirq context in the
    common case. This should minimize ksoftirqd execution, allowing us to
    skip boosting of ksoftirqd for CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y kernels.

    Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li
    Tested-by: "Alex,Shi"
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Shaohua Li
     

28 May, 2011

2 commits

  • It is not necessary to use waitqueues for the RCU kthreads because
    we always know exactly which thread is to be awakened. In addition,
    wake_up() only issues an actual wakeup when there is a thread waiting on
    the queue, which was why there was an extra explicit wake_up_process()
    to get the RCU kthreads started.

    Eliminating the waitqueues (and wake_up()) in favor of wake_up_process()
    eliminates the need for the initial wake_up_process() and also shrinks
    the data structure size a bit. The wakeup logic is placed in a new
    rcu_wait() macro.

    Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Peter Zijlstra
     
  • This commit switches manipulations of the rcu_node ->wakemask field
    to atomic operations, which allows rcu_cpu_kthread_timer() to avoid
    acquiring the rcu_node lock. This should avoid the following lockdep
    splat reported by Valdis Kletnieks:

    [ 12.872150] usb 1-4: new high speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd
    [ 12.986667] usb 1-4: New USB device found, idVendor=413c, idProduct=2513
    [ 12.986679] usb 1-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
    [ 12.987691] hub 1-4:1.0: USB hub found
    [ 12.987877] hub 1-4:1.0: 3 ports detected
    [ 12.996372] input: PS/2 Generic Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input10
    [ 13.071471] udevadm used greatest stack depth: 3984 bytes left
    [ 13.172129]
    [ 13.172130] =======================================================
    [ 13.172425] [ INFO: possible circular locking dependency detected ]
    [ 13.172650] 2.6.39-rc6-mmotm0506 #1
    [ 13.172773] -------------------------------------------------------
    [ 13.172997] blkid/267 is trying to acquire lock:
    [ 13.173009] (&p->pi_lock){-.-.-.}, at: [] try_to_wake_up+0x29/0x1aa
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] but task is already holding lock:
    [ 13.173009] (rcu_node_level_0){..-...}, at: [] rcu_cpu_kthread_timer+0x27/0x58
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] which lock already depends on the new lock.
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] the existing dependency chain (in reverse order) is:
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] -> #2 (rcu_node_level_0){..-...}:
    [ 13.173009] [] check_prevs_add+0x8b/0x104
    [ 13.173009] [] validate_chain+0x36f/0x3ab
    [ 13.173009] [] __lock_acquire+0x369/0x3e2
    [ 13.173009] [] lock_acquire+0xfc/0x14c
    [ 13.173009] [] _raw_spin_lock+0x36/0x45
    [ 13.173009] [] rcu_read_unlock_special+0x8c/0x1d5
    [ 13.173009] [] __rcu_read_unlock+0x4f/0xd7
    [ 13.173009] [] rcu_read_unlock+0x21/0x23
    [ 13.173009] [] cpuacct_charge+0x6c/0x75
    [ 13.173009] [] update_curr+0x101/0x12e
    [ 13.173009] [] check_preempt_wakeup+0xf7/0x23b
    [ 13.173009] [] check_preempt_curr+0x2b/0x68
    [ 13.173009] [] ttwu_do_wakeup+0x76/0x128
    [ 13.173009] [] ttwu_do_activate.constprop.63+0x57/0x5c
    [ 13.173009] [] scheduler_ipi+0x48/0x5d
    [ 13.173009] [] smp_reschedule_interrupt+0x16/0x18
    [ 13.173009] [] reschedule_interrupt+0x13/0x20
    [ 13.173009] [] rcu_read_unlock+0x21/0x23
    [ 13.173009] [] find_get_page+0xa9/0xb9
    [ 13.173009] [] filemap_fault+0x6a/0x34d
    [ 13.173009] [] __do_fault+0x54/0x3e6
    [ 13.173009] [] handle_pte_fault+0x12c/0x1ed
    [ 13.173009] [] handle_mm_fault+0x1cd/0x1e0
    [ 13.173009] [] do_page_fault+0x42d/0x5de
    [ 13.173009] [] page_fault+0x1f/0x30
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] -> #1 (&rq->lock){-.-.-.}:
    [ 13.173009] [] check_prevs_add+0x8b/0x104
    [ 13.173009] [] validate_chain+0x36f/0x3ab
    [ 13.173009] [] __lock_acquire+0x369/0x3e2
    [ 13.173009] [] lock_acquire+0xfc/0x14c
    [ 13.173009] [] _raw_spin_lock+0x36/0x45
    [ 13.173009] [] __task_rq_lock+0x8b/0xd3
    [ 13.173009] [] wake_up_new_task+0x41/0x108
    [ 13.173009] [] do_fork+0x265/0x33f
    [ 13.173009] [] kernel_thread+0x6b/0x6d
    [ 13.173009] [] rest_init+0x21/0xd2
    [ 13.173009] [] start_kernel+0x3bb/0x3c6
    [ 13.173009] [] x86_64_start_reservations+0xaf/0xb3
    [ 13.173009] [] x86_64_start_kernel+0xf0/0xf7
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] -> #0 (&p->pi_lock){-.-.-.}:
    [ 13.173009] [] check_prev_add+0x68/0x20e
    [ 13.173009] [] check_prevs_add+0x8b/0x104
    [ 13.173009] [] validate_chain+0x36f/0x3ab
    [ 13.173009] [] __lock_acquire+0x369/0x3e2
    [ 13.173009] [] lock_acquire+0xfc/0x14c
    [ 13.173009] [] _raw_spin_lock_irqsave+0x44/0x57
    [ 13.173009] [] try_to_wake_up+0x29/0x1aa
    [ 13.173009] [] wake_up_process+0x10/0x12
    [ 13.173009] [] rcu_cpu_kthread_timer+0x44/0x58
    [ 13.173009] [] call_timer_fn+0xac/0x1e9
    [ 13.173009] [] run_timer_softirq+0x1aa/0x1f2
    [ 13.173009] [] __do_softirq+0x109/0x26a
    [ 13.173009] [] call_softirq+0x1c/0x30
    [ 13.173009] [] do_softirq+0x44/0xf1
    [ 13.173009] [] irq_exit+0x58/0xc8
    [ 13.173009] [] smp_apic_timer_interrupt+0x79/0x87
    [ 13.173009] [] apic_timer_interrupt+0x13/0x20
    [ 13.173009] [] get_page_from_freelist+0x2aa/0x310
    [ 13.173009] [] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x178/0x243
    [ 13.173009] [] pte_alloc_one+0x1e/0x3a
    [ 13.173009] [] __pte_alloc+0x22/0x14b
    [ 13.173009] [] handle_mm_fault+0x17e/0x1e0
    [ 13.173009] [] do_page_fault+0x42d/0x5de
    [ 13.173009] [] page_fault+0x1f/0x30
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] other info that might help us debug this:
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] Chain exists of:
    [ 13.173009] &p->pi_lock --> &rq->lock --> rcu_node_level_0
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] Possible unsafe locking scenario:
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] CPU0 CPU1
    [ 13.173009] ---- ----
    [ 13.173009] lock(rcu_node_level_0);
    [ 13.173009] lock(&rq->lock);
    [ 13.173009] lock(rcu_node_level_0);
    [ 13.173009] lock(&p->pi_lock);
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] *** DEADLOCK ***
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] 3 locks held by blkid/267:
    [ 13.173009] #0: (&mm->mmap_sem){++++++}, at: [] do_page_fault+0x1f3/0x5de
    [ 13.173009] #1: (&yield_timer){+.-...}, at: [] call_timer_fn+0x0/0x1e9
    [ 13.173009] #2: (rcu_node_level_0){..-...}, at: [] rcu_cpu_kthread_timer+0x27/0x58
    [ 13.173009]
    [ 13.173009] stack backtrace:
    [ 13.173009] Pid: 267, comm: blkid Not tainted 2.6.39-rc6-mmotm0506 #1
    [ 13.173009] Call Trace:
    [ 13.173009] [] print_circular_bug+0xc8/0xd9
    [ 13.173009] [] check_prev_add+0x68/0x20e
    [ 13.173009] [] ? save_stack_trace+0x28/0x46
    [ 13.173009] [] check_prevs_add+0x8b/0x104
    [ 13.173009] [] validate_chain+0x36f/0x3ab
    [ 13.173009] [] __lock_acquire+0x369/0x3e2
    [ 13.173009] [] ? try_to_wake_up+0x29/0x1aa
    [ 13.173009] [] lock_acquire+0xfc/0x14c
    [ 13.173009] [] ? try_to_wake_up+0x29/0x1aa
    [ 13.173009] [] ? rcu_check_quiescent_state+0x82/0x82
    [ 13.173009] [] _raw_spin_lock_irqsave+0x44/0x57
    [ 13.173009] [] ? try_to_wake_up+0x29/0x1aa
    [ 13.173009] [] try_to_wake_up+0x29/0x1aa
    [ 13.173009] [] ? rcu_check_quiescent_state+0x82/0x82
    [ 13.173009] [] wake_up_process+0x10/0x12
    [ 13.173009] [] rcu_cpu_kthread_timer+0x44/0x58
    [ 13.173009] [] ? rcu_check_quiescent_state+0x82/0x82
    [ 13.173009] [] call_timer_fn+0xac/0x1e9
    [ 13.173009] [] ? del_timer+0x75/0x75
    [ 13.173009] [] ? rcu_check_quiescent_state+0x82/0x82
    [ 13.173009] [] run_timer_softirq+0x1aa/0x1f2
    [ 13.173009] [] __do_softirq+0x109/0x26a
    [ 13.173009] [] ? tick_dev_program_event+0x37/0xf6
    [ 13.173009] [] ? time_hardirqs_off+0x1b/0x2f
    [ 13.173009] [] call_softirq+0x1c/0x30
    [ 13.173009] [] do_softirq+0x44/0xf1
    [ 13.173009] [] irq_exit+0x58/0xc8
    [ 13.173009] [] smp_apic_timer_interrupt+0x79/0x87
    [ 13.173009] [] apic_timer_interrupt+0x13/0x20
    [ 13.173009] [] ? get_page_from_freelist+0x114/0x310
    [ 13.173009] [] ? get_page_from_freelist+0x2aa/0x310
    [ 13.173009] [] ? clear_page_c+0x7/0x10
    [ 13.173009] [] ? prep_new_page+0x14c/0x1cd
    [ 13.173009] [] get_page_from_freelist+0x2aa/0x310
    [ 13.173009] [] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x178/0x243
    [ 13.173009] [] ? __pmd_alloc+0x87/0x99
    [ 13.173009] [] pte_alloc_one+0x1e/0x3a
    [ 13.173009] [] ? __pmd_alloc+0x87/0x99
    [ 13.173009] [] __pte_alloc+0x22/0x14b
    [ 13.173009] [] handle_mm_fault+0x17e/0x1e0
    [ 13.173009] [] do_page_fault+0x42d/0x5de
    [ 13.173009] [] ? sys_brk+0x32/0x10c
    [ 13.173009] [] ? time_hardirqs_off+0x1b/0x2f
    [ 13.173009] [] ? trace_hardirqs_off_caller+0x3f/0x9c
    [ 13.173009] [] ? trace_hardirqs_off_thunk+0x3a/0x3c
    [ 13.173009] [] page_fault+0x1f/0x30
    [ 14.010075] usb 5-1: new full speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd

    Reported-by: Valdis Kletnieks
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney
     

27 May, 2011

1 commit

  • (Note: this was reverted, and is now being re-applied in pieces, with
    this being the fifth and final piece. See below for the reason that
    it is now felt to be safe to re-apply this.)

    Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb()
    invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but
    sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes
    them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds
    a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to
    rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the
    compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based
    critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not
    entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view.

    In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact
    that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could
    be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference
    across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the
    addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has
    the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the
    functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope
    that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but
    some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications
    can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.)

    This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock
    acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in
    deadlock. The proof is as follows:

    1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of
    its leaf rcu_node's lock.

    2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the
    last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the
    ->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only
    after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this
    lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf
    node's lock.

    3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure.
    Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through
    this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock
    must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node.

    4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state
    structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node
    hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code
    preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical
    section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a
    memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates
    preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened
    before the update of ->completed.

    5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp()
    will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf
    rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock.
    If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation
    will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was
    set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still
    seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity.

    6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes
    aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes
    any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible
    for invocation.

    If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace
    period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy,
    we will still be in the single critical section. In this case,
    the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will
    be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state.

    On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire
    the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after
    each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period.

    On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory
    barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp().
    The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to
    reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick
    per CPU to once per grace period.

    This was reverted do to hangs found during testing by Yinghai Lu and
    Ingo Molnar. Frederic Weisbecker supplied Yinghai with tracing that
    located the underlying problem, and Frederic also provided the fix.

    The underlying problem was that the HARDIRQ_ENTER() macro from
    lib/locking-selftest.c invoked irq_enter(), which in turn invokes
    rcu_irq_enter(), but HARDIRQ_EXIT() invoked __irq_exit(), which
    does not invoke rcu_irq_exit(). This situation resulted in calls
    to rcu_irq_enter() that were not balanced by the required calls to
    rcu_irq_exit(). Therefore, after these locking selftests completed,
    RCU's dyntick-idle nesting count was a large number (for example,
    72), which caused RCU to to conclude that the affected CPU was not in
    dyntick-idle mode when in fact it was.

    RCU would therefore incorrectly wait for this dyntick-idle CPU, resulting
    in hangs.

    In contrast, with Frederic's patch, which replaces the irq_enter()
    in HARDIRQ_ENTER() with an __irq_enter(), these tests don't ever call
    either rcu_irq_enter() or rcu_irq_exit(), which works because the CPU
    running the test is already marked as not being in dyntick-idle mode.
    This means that the rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() calls and RCU
    then has no problem working out which CPUs are in dyntick-idle mode and
    which are not.

    The reason that the imbalance was not noticed before the barrier patch
    was applied is that the old implementation of rcu_enter_nohz() ignored
    the nesting depth. This could still result in delays, but much shorter
    ones. Whenever there was a delay, RCU would IPI the CPU with the
    unbalanced nesting level, which would eventually result in rcu_enter_nohz()
    being called, which in turn would force RCU to see that the CPU was in
    dyntick-idle mode.

    The reason that very few people noticed the problem is that the mismatched
    irq_enter() vs. __irq_exit() occured only when the kernel was built with
    CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCKING_API_SELFTESTS.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     

20 May, 2011

1 commit


08 May, 2011

1 commit

  • Avoid calling into the scheduler while holding core RCU locks. This
    allows rcu_read_unlock() to be called while holding the runqueue locks,
    but only as long as there was no chance of the RCU read-side critical
    section having been preempted. (Otherwise, if RCU priority boosting
    is enabled, rcu_read_unlock() might call into the scheduler in order to
    unboost itself, which might allows self-deadlock on the runqueue locks
    within the scheduler.)

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     

06 May, 2011

9 commits

  • The "preemptible" spelling is preferable. May as well fix it.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • This commit adds the age in jiffies of the current grace period along
    with the duration in jiffies of the longest grace period since boot
    to the rcu/rcugp debugfs file. It also adds an additional "O" state
    to kthread tracing to differentiate between the kthread waiting due to
    having nothing to do on the one hand and waiting due to being on the
    wrong CPU on the other hand.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Add tracing to help debugging situations when RCU's kthreads are not
    running but are supposed to be.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Includes total number of tasks boosted, number boosted on behalf of each
    of normal and expedited grace periods, and statistics on attempts to
    initiate boosting that failed for various reasons.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Add priority boosting for TREE_PREEMPT_RCU, similar to that for
    TINY_PREEMPT_RCU. This is enabled by the default-off RCU_BOOST
    kernel parameter. The priority to which to boost preempted
    RCU readers is controlled by the RCU_BOOST_PRIO kernel parameter
    (defaulting to real-time priority 1) and the time to wait before
    boosting the readers who are blocking a given grace period is
    controlled by the RCU_BOOST_DELAY kernel parameter (defaulting to
    500 milliseconds).

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • If RCU priority boosting is to be meaningful, callback invocation must
    be boosted in addition to preempted RCU readers. Otherwise, in presence
    of CPU real-time threads, the grace period ends, but the callbacks don't
    get invoked. If the callbacks don't get invoked, the associated memory
    doesn't get freed, so the system is still subject to OOM.

    But it is not reasonable to priority-boost RCU_SOFTIRQ, so this commit
    moves the callback invocations to a kthread, which can be boosted easily.

    Also add comments and properly synchronized all accesses to
    rcu_cpu_kthread_task, as suggested by Lai Jiangshan.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Combine the current TREE_PREEMPT_RCU ->blocked_tasks[] lists in the
    rcu_node structure into a single ->blkd_tasks list with ->gp_tasks
    and ->exp_tasks tail pointers. This is in preparation for RCU priority
    boosting, which will add a third dimension to the combinatorial explosion
    in the ->blocked_tasks[] case, but simply a third pointer in the new
    ->blkd_tasks case.

    Also update documentation to reflect blocked_tasks[] merge

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb()
    invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but
    sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes
    them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds
    a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to
    rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the
    compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based
    critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not
    entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view.

    In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact
    that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could
    be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference
    across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the
    addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has
    the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the
    functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope
    that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but
    some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications
    can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.)

    This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock
    acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in
    deadlock. The proof is as follows:

    1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of
    its leaf rcu_node's lock.

    2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the
    last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the
    ->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only
    after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this
    lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf
    node's lock.

    3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure.
    Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through
    this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock
    must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node.

    4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state
    structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node
    hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code
    preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical
    section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a
    memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates
    preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened
    before the update of ->completed.

    5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp()
    will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf
    rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock.
    If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation
    will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was
    set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still
    seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity.

    6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes
    aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes
    any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible
    for invocation.

    If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace
    period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy,
    we will still be in the single critical section. In this case,
    the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will
    be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state.

    On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire
    the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after
    each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period.

    On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory
    barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp().
    The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to
    reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick
    per CPU to once per grace period.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • The RCU CPU stall warnings can now be controlled using the
    rcu_cpu_stall_suppress boot-time parameter or via the same parameter
    from sysfs. There is therefore no longer any reason to have
    kernel config parameters for this feature. This commit therefore
    removes the RCU_CPU_STALL_DETECTOR and RCU_CPU_STALL_DETECTOR_RUNNABLE
    kernel config parameters. The RCU_CPU_STALL_TIMEOUT parameter remains
    to allow the timeout to be tuned and the RCU_CPU_STALL_VERBOSE parameter
    remains to allow task-stall information to be suppressed if desired.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     

18 Dec, 2010

1 commit

  • Some recent benchmarks have indicated possible lock contention on the
    leaf-level rcu_node locks. This commit therefore limits the number of
    CPUs per leaf-level rcu_node structure to 16, in other words, there
    can be at most 16 rcu_data structures fanning into a given rcu_node
    structure. Prior to this, the limit was 32 on 32-bit systems and 64 on
    64-bit systems.

    Note that the fanout of non-leaf rcu_node structures is unchanged. The
    organization of accesses to the rcu_node tree is such that references
    to non-leaf rcu_node structures are much less frequent than to the
    leaf structures.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     

30 Nov, 2010

1 commit

  • When we handle the CPU_DYING notifier, the whole system is stopped except
    for the current CPU. We therefore need no synchronization with the other
    CPUs. This allows us to move any orphaned RCU callbacks directly to the
    list of any online CPU without needing to run them through the global
    orphan lists. These global orphan lists can therefore be dispensed with.
    This commit makes thes changes, though currently victimizes CPU 0 @@@.

    Signed-off-by: Lai Jiangshan
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Lai Jiangshan
     

24 Sep, 2010

1 commit

  • The current tracing data is not sufficient to deduce the average time
    that a callback spends waiting for a grace period to end. Add three
    per-CPU counters recording the number of callbacks invoked (ci), the
    number of callbacks orphaned (co), and the number of callbacks adopted
    (ca). Given the existing callback queue length (ql), the average wait
    time in absence of CPU hotplug operations is ql/ci. The units of wait
    time will be in terms of the duration over which ci was measured.

    In the presence of CPU hotplug operations, there is room for argument,
    but ql/(ci-co+ca) won't steer you too far wrong.

    Also fixes a typo called out by Lucas De Marchi .

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     

21 Aug, 2010

2 commits

  • Combine the duplicate definitions of ULONG_CMP_GE(), ULONG_CMP_LT(),
    and rcu_preempt_depth() into include/linux/rcupdate.h.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • When using a kernel debugger, a long sojourn in the debugger can get
    you lots of RCU CPU stall warnings once you resume. This might not be
    helpful, especially if you are using the system console. This patch
    therefore allows RCU CPU stall warnings to be suppressed, but only for
    the duration of the current set of grace periods.

    This differs from Jason's original patch in that it adds support for
    tiny RCU and preemptible RCU, and uses a slightly different method for
    suppressing the RCU CPU stall warning messages.

    Signed-off-by: Jason Wessel
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Tested-by: Jason Wessel

    Paul E. McKenney
     

20 Aug, 2010

3 commits

  • Currently, if RCU CPU stall warnings are enabled, they are enabled
    immediately upon boot. They can be manually disabled via /sys (and
    also re-enabled via /sys), and are automatically disabled upon panic.
    However, some users need RCU CPU stalls to be disabled at boot time,
    but to be enabled without rebuilding/rebooting. For example, someone
    running a real-time application in production might not want the
    additional latency of RCU CPU stall detection in normal operation, but
    might need to enable it at any point for fault isolation purposes.

    This commit therefore provides a new CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_DETECTOR_RUNNABLE
    kernel configuration parameter that maintains the current behavior
    (enable at boot) by default, but allows a kernel to be configured
    with RCU CPU stall detection built into the kernel, but disabled at
    boot time.

    Requested-by: Clark Williams
    Requested-by: John Kacur
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Also set the default to 60 seconds, up from the previous hard-coded timeout
    of 10 seconds. This allows people who care to set short timeouts, while
    avoiding people with unusual configurations (make randconfig!!!) from being
    bothered with spurious CPU stall warnings.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • &percpu_data is compatible with allocated percpu data.

    And we use it and remove the "->rda[NR_CPUS]" array, saving significant
    storage on systems with large numbers of CPUs. This does add an additional
    level of indirection and thus an additional cache line referenced, but
    because ->rda is not used on the read side, this is OK.

    Signed-off-by: Lai Jiangshan
    Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett

    Lai Jiangshan
     

11 May, 2010

2 commits

  • Lai Jiangshan noted that up to 10% of the RCU_SOFTIRQ are spurious, and
    traced this down to the fact that the current grace-period machinery
    will uselessly raise RCU_SOFTIRQ when a given CPU needs to go through
    a quiescent state, but has not yet done so. In this situation, there
    might well be nothing that RCU_SOFTIRQ can do, and the overhead can be
    worth worrying about in the ksoftirqd case. This patch therefore avoids
    raising RCU_SOFTIRQ in this situation.

    Changes since v1 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/3/30/122 from Lai Jiangshan):

    o Omit the rcu_qs_pending() prechecks, as they aren't that
    much less expensive than the quiescent-state checks.

    o Merge with the set_need_resched() patch that reduces IPIs.

    o Add the new n_rp_report_qs field to the rcu_pending tracing output.

    o Update the tracing documentation accordingly.

    Signed-off-by: Lai Jiangshan
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • The existing RCU CPU stall-warning messages can be confusing, especially
    in the case where one CPU detects a single other stalled CPU. In addition,
    the console messages did not say which flavor of RCU detected the stall,
    which can make it difficult to work out exactly what is causing the stall.
    This commit improves these messages.

    Requested-by: Dhaval Giani
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney

    Paul E. McKenney
     

11 Mar, 2010

1 commit

  • CONFIG_PROVE_RCU imposes additional overhead on the kernel, so
    increase the RCU CPU stall timeouts in an attempt to allow for
    this effect.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Cc: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com
    Cc: dipankar@in.ibm.com
    Cc: mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca
    Cc: josh@joshtriplett.org
    Cc: dvhltc@us.ibm.com
    Cc: niv@us.ibm.com
    Cc: peterz@infradead.org
    Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org
    Cc: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
    Cc: dhowells@redhat.com
    LKML-Reference:
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney