Re: Alleged fix for writer stall on -rcu branch dev

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 07:21:53AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 05:06:10PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 01:33:02PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 09:19:18PM +0200, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> > > > On 2019-04-10 11:41:05 [-0700], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 08:15:38PM +0200, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> > > > > > On 2019-04-09 15:14:26 [-0700], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > > > Hello, Sebastian,
> > > > > > Hi Paul,
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > > A few commits later, I finally have something that might work.  ;-)
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Okay. I started with 33e04e4512797b5e0242f452d0027b096d43d006. The first
> > > > > > batch of 18 completed and this
> > > > > > 	https://breakpoint.cc/console-tree1.2.log
> > > > > 
> > > > > Another new one on me!  ;-)
> > > > > 
> > > > > It looks like CPU 11 got stuck in the cpu_stopper_thread trying to
> > > > > offline CPU 6.  Unfortunately, CPU 6 is not in the list receiving an
> > > > > NMI, perhaps because it looked like it was already offline.  It does
> > > > > eventually finish going offline quite some time later.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Perhaps my forward-progress testing is interacting badly with CPU
> > > > > hotplug, but only very occasionally?
> > > > 
> > > > Somehow, yes.
> > > > 
> > > > [ 8433.835292] Unregister pv shared memory for cpu 6
> > > > [ 8433.864122] smpboot: CPU 6 is now offline
> > > > 
> > > > CPU6 is offline.
> > > > 
> > > > [ 8434.934765] smpboot: Booting Node 0 Processor 6 APIC 0x6
> > > > [ 8434.950632] kvm-clock: cpu 6, msr 17155a181, secondary cpu clock
> > > > [ 8434.989124] KVM setup async PF for cpu 6
> > > > [ 8434.990801] kvm-stealtime: cpu 6, msr 17b195380
> > > > 
> > > > CPU6 is booting again.
> > > > 
> > > > [ 8436.035269] Unregister pv shared memory for cpu 6
> > > > 
> > > > going down again
> > > > 
> > > > [ 8462.032468] rcu: INFO: rcu_preempt self-detected stall on CPU
> > > > [ 8462.037385] rcu: 	11-...!: (25587 ticks this GP) idle=57e/1/0x4000000000000002 softirq=418067/418067 fqs=1 last_accelerate: 2456/89e6, Nonlazy posted: .LD
> > > > 
> > > > 25587 ticks is ~25secs with HZ=1k. And the stall occurred on CPU11,
> > > > correct?
> > > 
> > > Yes to both.
> > > 
> > > > [ 8525.041031] smpboot: CPU 6 is now offline
> > > > 
> > > > 63 secs later, the CPU is down. So that is too long.
> > > 
> > > Ah, I did miss the down-then-up, thank you!
> > > 
> > > > > Something for me to look at, anyway!
> > > > 
> > > > There is also
> > > > [ 8556.907804] WARNING: CPU: 35 PID: 833 at /home/bigeasy/linux-rt/kernel/rcu/rcutorture.c:1827 rcu_torture_fwd_prog+0x5c4/0x630
> > > > 
> > > > but I'm not sure what it is :)
> > > 
> > > The forward-progress test exceeded eight seconds, but pushed fewer
> > > than 100 callbacks through the system.  One way that could happen is
> > > if the forward-progress kthread was delayed during that eight seconds.
> > > Another is if grace periods were insanely fast (which they are not).
> > > 
> > > > > > I should have been alone on that server but I can't guarantee it. I try
> > > > > > to throw the rcu-torture at a little smaller box and check how it goes.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Even if you were not alone, I would guess that preempting a runnable
> > > > > process for 92 seconds would have been a visible event on the host.
> > > > 
> > > > 92 seconds?! Okay, that should have been visible on the host side. And I
> > > > see nothing in dmesg on the host side.
> > > > But why 92? 25 for RCU stall + 63 between starting to go down and
> > > > finishing?
> > > 
> > > Because I missed the momentary up-then-down that you spotted.  Your 63
> > > seconds is correct.
> > > 
> > > > > But maybe not?  The watchdog timer is still 120 seconds?  Or does your
> > > > > host set it to 22 seconds?
> > > > 
> > > > I didn't fiddle with it and host runs 4.19.12-1~bpo9+1. So it should be
> > > > the default value.
> > > 
> > > Which I believe to be 22 seconds.  Hmmm...
> > > 
> > > Either way, thank you very much for the testing!!!
> > 
> > [ Adding LKML back -- I think we dropped it due to an attachment? ]
> > 
> > One area of some concern is RCU_KTHREAD_YIELDING and the rcuc kthreads.
> > This shouldn't be a big deal for the intended use case (real-time
> > workloads with lightish load), but a two-jiffy delay could allow quite a
> > few callbacks to build up when doing forward-progress testing.  But not
> > a problem for use_softirq runs, which is what you were running.
> > 
> > But it might be that I need to either skip the forward-progress testing
> > if !use_softirq, skip the RCU_KTHREAD_YIELDING step if there are too
> > many callbacks, or some such.  Either way, though, I would need at least
> > a cond_resched() on each pass through the rcu_cpu_kthread() function.
> > 
> > Thoughts from a real-time perspective?
> > 
> > Oooh...  But in both use_softirq and !use_softirq runs, if the CPU to be
> > offlined has a huge number of callbacks pending (assuming callbacks are
> > not offloaded), there could be quite the delay imposed on the offlining
> > of that CPU.  Now 63 seconds seems a bit much, but there can be tens
> > of millions of callbacks queued up to be invoked.  It -could- happen,
> > I suppose, though I would guess more like a couple of seconds.
> > 
> > Maybe I need to ignore the ignoring of blimit for a CPU that is going
> > offline...  The theory is that the callbacks will just get dumped on
> > some other CPU if the CPU is going away, and on the other hand invoking
> > callbacks sparingly would help the CPU come back all the way online
> > more quickly.  Unless one of the callbacks on that CPU was the one from
> > the synchronize_rcu() in the CPU-hotplug offline path.  :-/
> > 
> > So I could start going slow on callbacks on the outgoing CPU as soon as
> > that synchronize_rcu() completes.  Horribly fragile, given the possibility
> > of synchronize_rcu() in other CPU-hotplug notifiers, though.  Plus it
> > looks like sched_cpu_deactivate() is about the first thing that happens
> > when removing a CPU.
> > 
> > But you know...  Ignoring the world while invoking up to LONG_MAX RCU
> > callbacks back to back probably never was an optimal plan.  So if that
> > splat is at all reproducible, could you please give the patch below a try?
> > 
> > I have just touch-tested this on TREE01 and TREE04.  I will be testing
> > the rest of the scenarios overnight, Pacific Time.
> > 
> > Of course, if you have more failures, please let me know!
> 
> And after ramping up the stress in rcutorture a bit, I am able to
> reproduce this CPU stall involving offlining on my systems.  My plan is
> my usual one:  Keep increasing rcutorture stress to get it to reproduce
> in reasonable time, add diagnostics as appropriate, and continue making
> forward-progress improvements in RCU itself.
> 
> Thank you very much for locating this one!!!

Oh, and probably more to the point...  I reviewed your patch, and with
the subsequent changes it looks sane to me.  Plus the test failures thus
far don't appear to have anything to do with your patch.  However, I am
too cowardly to push this into the upcoming merge window, so I will do
so on the one following (v5.3).

							Thanx, Paul