Re: frequent lockups in 3.18rc4

From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
Date: Wed Dec 17 2014 - 12:03:42 EST


On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 04:41:16PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >> OK, should we just stick it in the x86 tree and see if anything
> >> explodes? ;-)
> >
> > Gaah, I got confused about the patches.
> >
> > And something did explode, it showed some Xen nasties. Xen has that
> > odd "we don't share PMD entries between MM's" thing going on, which
> > means that the vmalloc fault thing does actually have to occasionally
> > walk two levels rather than just copy the top level. I'm still not
> > sure why Xen doesn't share PMD's, since threads that shame the MM
> > clearly can share PMD's within Xen, but I gave up on it.
>
> Sounds like it's time to ask Konrad, the source of all Xen understanding :)

Awesome :-)
>
> Linus, do you have a pointer to whatever version of the patch you tried?

The patch was this:

a) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1835331

Then Jurgen had a patch:
https://lkml.kernel.org/g/CA+55aFxSRujj=cM1NkXYvxmo=Y1hb1e3tgLhdh1JDphzV6WKRw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
which was one fix for one bug that ended up being fixed in QEMU - so
it can be ignored.

But my understanding of that thread was that it said patch 'a)' did not
fix Dave's issues - and the conversation went off on NMI watchdog?

I will look up the giant thread to make sense.


>
> --Andy
>
> >
> > That said, making x86-64 use "read_cr3()" instead of
> > "current->active_mm" would at least make things a bit safer wrt NMI's
> > during the task switch, of course. So *some* 32/64-bit consolidation
> > should be done, but my patch went a bit too far for Xen.
> >
> > Linus
>
>
>
> --
> Andy Lutomirski
> AMA Capital Management, LLC
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