Re: Warning from swake_up_all in 4.14.15-rt13 non-RT

From: Corey Minyard
Date: Thu Mar 08 2018 - 14:54:29 EST


On 03/08/2018 11:41 AM, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
On 2018-03-07 09:45:29 [-0600], Corey Minyard wrote:
I have no idea what is the wisest thing to do here. The obvious fix
would be to use the irqsafe() variant here and not drop the lock between
wake ups. That is essentially what swake_up_all_locked() does which I
need for the completions (and based on some testing most users have one
waiter except during PM and some crypto code).
It is probably no comparison to wake_up_q() (which does multiple wake
ups without a context switch) but then we did this before like that.

Preferably we would have a proper list_splice() and some magic in the
"early" dequeue part that works.

Maybe just modify the block code to run the swake_up_all() call in a
workqueue
or tasklet? If you think that works, I'll create a patch, test it, and
submit it if
all goes well.
It will work but I don't think pushing this into workqueue/tasklet is a
good idea. You want to wakeup all waiters on waitqueue X (probably one
waiter) and instead there is one one wakeup + ctx-switch which does the
final wakeup.

True, but this is an uncommon and already fairly expensive operation being
done. Adding a context switch doesn't seem that bad.

But now I had an idea: swake_up_all() could iterate over list and
instead performing wakes it would just wake_q_add() the tasks. Drop the
lock and then wake_up_q(). So in case there is wakeup pending and the
task removed itself from the list then the task may observe a spurious
wakeup.

That sounds promising, but where does wake_up_q() get called? No matter what
it's an expensive operation and I'm not sure where you would put it in this case.

I had another idea. This is only occurring if RT is not enabled, because with
RT all the irq disable things go away and you are generally running in task
context. So why not have a different version of swake_up_all() for non-RT
that does work from irqs-off context?

-corey