On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 05:12:46PM +0100, Petr Mladek wrote:
> On Tue 2016-11-29 09:09:17, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 06:07:34AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 10:16:50AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 11:52:41PM -0600, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> > > > > > We used to do that, but the resulting NMIs were problematic on some
> > > > > > platforms. Perhaps things have gotten better?
> > > > >
> > > > > Did a little digging on git blame and found the following commit
> > > > > (which
> > > > > seems to be the cause of the KASAN warning and missing stack dump):
> > > > >
> > > > > bc1dce514e9b ("rcu: Don't use NMIs to dump other CPUs' stacks")
> > > > >
> > > > > I presume this commit is still needed because of the NMI printk
> > > > > deadlock
> > > > > issues which were discussed at Kernel Summit. I guess those issues
> > > > > need
> > > > > to be sorted out before the above commit can be reverted.
> > > >
> > > > so printk should more or less work from NMI, esp. after:
> > > >
> > > > 42a0bb3f7138 ("printk/nmi: generic solution for safe printk in NMI")
> > >
> > > And of course bc1dce514e9b doesn't revert cleanly, but see hand reversion
> > > below. Also, 42a0bb3f7138's commit log calls out MN10300 and Xtensa as
> > > needing more work. Has that happened?
> >
> > Petr M, any idea?
>
> These two architectures do not support the safe printk in NMI. But
> these architectures also do not implement trigger_all_cpu_backtrace()
> and other trigger_*_backtrace() functions. Therefore these functions
> return false there.
>
> In fact, only very few architectures implement trigger_*_backtrace().
> And only few of them use NMI (x86, arm, tile). I have just double
> checked that these all use the safe printk in NMI.
>
> By other words, if trigger_all_cpu_backtrace() or
> trigger_single_cpu_backtrace() returns true, it should be NMI safe
> and you could use it here.
Good, I will upgrade my commit to Signed-off-by, then.
> > > But I really like the fact that RCU CPU stall warnings dump only those
> > > stacks that are likely to be involved, and the patch below goes back
> > > to dumping everyone. Shouldn't be that hard to fix, though...
> >
> > There's a new trigger_single_cpu_backtrace() function which can be used
> > for that.
>
> There is newly also trigger_cpumask_backtrace(struct cpumask *mask)
> where you could select more CPUs using the mask. If this is of any help.
In my experience, there is almost never a large number of CPUs stalling
a given RCU grace period. But thank you for letting me know about
trigger_cpumask_backtrace(), as it might be useful in the future.
Thanx, Paul
