[PATCH 0/4] printk: Softlockup avoidance

[Jan Kara]

From: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>

Hello,

since lately there were several attempts at dealing with softlockups due
to heavy printk traffic [1] [2] and I've been also privately pinged by
couple of people about the state of the patch set, I've decided to respin
the patch set.

To remind the original problem:

Currently, console_unlock() prints messages from kernel printk buffer to
console while the buffer is non-empty. When serial console is attached,
printing is slow and thus other CPUs in the system have plenty of time
to append new messages to the buffer while one CPU is printing. Thus the
CPU can spend unbounded amount of time doing printing in console_unlock().
This is especially serious when printk() gets called under some critical
spinlock or with interrupts disabled.
    
In practice users have observed a CPU can spend tens of seconds printing
in console_unlock() (usually during boot when hundreds of SCSI devices
are discovered) resulting in RCU stalls (CPU doing printing doesn't
reach quiescent state for a long time), softlockup reports (IPIs for the
printing CPU don't get served and thus other CPUs are spinning waiting
for the printing CPU to process IPIs), and eventually a machine death
(as messages from stalls and lockups append to printk buffer faster than
we are able to print). So these machines are unable to boot with serial
console attached. Also during artificial stress testing SATA disk
disappears from the system because its interrupts aren't served for too
long.

This series addresses the problem in the following way: If CPU has printed
more that printk_offload (defaults to 1000) characters, it wakes up one
of dedicated printk kthreads (we don't use workqueue because that has
deadlock potential if printk was called from workqueue code). Once we find
out kthread is spinning on a lock, we stop printing, drop console_sem, and
let kthread continue printing. Since there are two printing kthreads, they
will pass printing between them and thus no CPU gets hogged by printing.

Changes since the last posting [3]:
* I have replaced the state machine to pass printing and spinning on
  console_sem with a simple spinlock which makes the code
  somewhat easier to read and verify.
* Some of the patches were merged so I dropped them.

								Honza

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/8/215
[2] http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=143929238407816&w=2
[3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/3/17/68
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