Re: False-positive RCU stall warnings on large systems...

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 05:02:37PM +0800, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> On 02/26/2013 12:32 AM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:35:57AM +0800, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> >>On 20/02/2013 02:16, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >>>On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:34:12AM +0800, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> >>>>Hi Paul,
> >>>>
> >>>>On some of our larger servers with many hundreds of cores and when
> >>>>under high duress, we can see scheduler RCU stall warnings [1], so
> >>>>find we have to increase the hardcoded RCU_STALL_RAT_DELAY up from 2
> >>>>and RCU_JIFFIES_TILL_FORCE_QS up from 3.
> >
> >Disabling RCU_FAST_NO_HZ will likely remove the need to adjust
> >RCU_JIFFIES_TILL_FORCE_QS.  Changes in my -rcu tree will likely remove the
> >need to adjust these two in 3.10 or 3.11, depending on how testing goes.
> >
> >>>>Is there a more sustainable way to account for this to avoid it
> >>>>being hard-coded, such as making it and dependent timeouts a
> >>>>fraction of CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_TIMEOUT?
> >
> >Maybe...  But what this means is that your system is so heavily loaded
> >that the CPU in question is failing to make it to RCU's softirq handler
> >in two jiffies worth of time.  This is a function of workload rather
> >than of the number of CPUs.
> >
> >>>>On the other hand, perhaps this is just caused by clock jitter (eg
> >>>>due to distance from a contended clock source)? So increasing these
> >>>>a bit may just be adequate in general...
> >>>
> >>>Hmmm...  What version of the kernel are you running?
> >>
> >>The example below occurs with v3.8, but we see the same with
> >>previous kernels eg v3.5.
> >
> >There is always the rcutree.rcu_cpu_stall_timeout parameter that sets
> >the stall timeout in seconds.  This may be specified at boot time or
> >via sysfs at runtime.  The default is now 21 seconds.
> >
> >>Of course, when using the local TSC, you'd see no jitter relative to
> >>coherent transactions (eg memory writes), but when the HPET is used
> >>across a large system, coherent transactions to distant cores are
> >>just so much faster, as there's massive congestion to the shared
> >>HPET behind various HT and PCIe bridges. This could be where the
> >>jitter arises from, if I'm guessing jitter is the problem here.
> >
> >Agreed, timing jitter could cause problems.  That said, the code uses
> >the jiffies counter to compute these timings.  Are you seeing similar
> >memory contention on the jiffies counter itself?
> 
> The contention we see in general are when cores contend for a
> spinlock and when there are lots of concurrent HPET reads (Opterons
> allow only 4 outstanding reads to the IO hub).

Seems to me that the RCU CPU stalls are correctly detecting that your
platform has a problem, namely excessive contention on your HPET hardware.

> It's probably possible to reproduce rcu_sched stalls on a
> quad-socket box with 64 cores and the right workload with the TSC
> disabled.
> 
> In 3.9-rc1 with RCU_FAST_NO_HZ disabled, we've seen stalls of 4
> jiffies [2], but without the "Stall ended" message. This is with a
> workload which allocates ~256GB of memory over 192 cores.

Right, the "stall ended" messages appear only when one CPU detects
another's stall.  In your case below, there is a self-detected stall,
and it does not check.

So I could add a similar check in the self-detect case, if that is what
you are getting at.

							Thanx, Paul

> Thanks,
>   Daniel
> 
> >>>>--- [1]
> >>>>
> >>>>[ 3939.010085] INFO: rcu_sched detected stalls on CPUs/tasks: {}
> >>>>(detected by 1, t=29662 jiffies, g=3053, c=3052, q=598)
> >>>>[ 3939.020008] INFO: Stall ended before state dump start
> 
> --- [2]
> 
> [10660.110620] INFO: rcu_sched self-detected stall on CPU { 39}
> (t=4 jiffies g=1169 c=1168 q=8)
> [10660.110620] Pid: 11747, comm: sp.B Not tainted 3.9.0-rc1-advanced #6
> [10660.110620] Call Trace:
> [10660.110620]  <IRQ>  [<ffffffff810b2a42>] ?
> rcu_check_callbacks+0x2d2/0x5f0
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff8107d94a>] ? run_posix_cpu_timers+0x3a/0x790
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff8106c86f>] ? update_process_times+0x3f/0x80
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff81098280>] ? tick_sched_handle.isra.8+0x30/0x40
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff810983b2>] ? tick_sched_timer+0x42/0x70
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff8107e66a>] ? __run_hrtimer.isra.30+0x4a/0xe0
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff8107ef45>] ? hrtimer_interrupt+0xe5/0x220
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff8104c5a3>] ? smp_apic_timer_interrupt+0x63/0xa0
> [10660.110620]  [<ffffffff8186e887>] ? apic_timer_interrupt+0x67/0x70
> -- 
> Daniel J Blueman
> Principal Software Engineer, Numascale Asia
> 

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