Re: [RFC][PATCH] cpu_pm: Remove RCU abuse

From: Paul E. McKenney
Date: Thu Sep 03 2020 - 11:36:03 EST


On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 05:08:19PM +0200, peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 04:36:35PM +0200, Ulf Hansson wrote:
> > On Thu, 3 Sep 2020 at 15:53, <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > static int cpu_pm_notify(enum cpu_pm_event event)
> > > {
> > > int ret;
> > >
> > > + lockdep_assert_irqs_disabled();
> >
> > Nitpick, maybe the lockdep should be moved to a separate patch.
>
> Well, the unregister relies on IRQs being disabled here, so I figured
> asserting this was a good thing ;-)
>
> Starting the audit below, this might not in fact be true, which then
> invalidates the unregister implementation. In particular the notifier in
> arch/arm/kernel/hw_breakpoint.c seems to unconditionally enable IRQs.
>
> > > + ret = raw_notifier_call_chain(&cpu_pm_notifier_chain, event, NULL);
> >
> > Converting to raw_notifiers seems reasonable - if we need to avoid the
> > RCU usage.
> >
> > My point is, I wonder about if the notifier callbacks themselves are
> > safe from RCU usage. For example, I would not be surprised if tracing
> > is happening behind them.
>
> A bunch of them seem to call into the clk domain stuff, and I think
> there's tracepoints in that.
>
> > Moreover, I am not sure that we really need to prevent and limit
> > tracing from happening. Instead we could push rcu_idle_enter|exit()
> > further down to the arch specific code in the cpuidle drivers, as you
> > kind of all proposed earlier.
>
> Well, at some point the CPU is in a really dodgy state, ISTR there being
> ARM platforms where you have to manually leave the cache coherency
> fabric and all sorts of insanity. There should be a definite cut-off on
> tracing before that.
>
> Also, what is the point of all this clock and power domain callbacks, if
> not to put the CPU into an extremely low power state, surely you want to
> limit the amount of code that's ran when the CPU is in such a state.
>
> > In this way, we can step by step, move to a new "version" of
> > cpu_pm_enter() that doesn't have to deal with rcu_irq_enter_irqson(),
> > because RCU hasn't been pushed to idle yet.
>
> That should be easy enough to audit. The thing is that mainline is now
> generating (debug) splats, and some people are upset with this.
>
> If you're ok with ARM not being lockdep clean while this is being
> reworked I'm perfectly fine with that.
>
> (There used to be a separate CONFIG for RCU-lockdep, but that seems to
> have been removed)

CONFIG_PROVE_RCU still gates RCU_LOCKDEP_WARN(), but it is now a
def_bool that follows CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING.

It would not be hard to make CONFIG_PROVE_RCU separately settable only
for arm, if that would help.

Thanx, Paul