Re: combinatorial explosion in lockdep

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 21:45 -0700, David Miller wrote:
> From: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
> Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:44:15 -0700 (PDT)
> 
> > From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
> > Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:51:33 +0200
> > 
> > > Any chance to get the "cat /proc/lockdep*" output, so that we could see 
> > > and check the expected behavior of the full graph?
> > 
> > /proc/lockdep loops forever in count_forward_deps() :-)
> > 
> > I was able to capture a copy of lockdep_chains:
> > 
> > http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/lockdep_chains.bz2
> 
> As a followup I dumped the full backwards search graph once the cost
> got up to about (1 * 1024 * 1024) checks or so.
> 
> I didn't find any loops, but it is clear that the cost is huge because
> of the runqueue lock double-locking, without the generation count
> patch I posted the other day.
> 
> For example, if you start with the first runqueue lock you search one
> entry:
> 
> 	1
> 
> Next, if you start with the second runqueue lock you search two
> entries:
> 
> 	2, 1
> 
> Next, if you start with the third runqueue lock you search
> 4 entries:
> 
> 	3, 2, 1, 1
> 
> And the next series is:
> 
> 	4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1
> 
> and so on and so forth.  So the cost of a full backwards graph
> traversal for N cpus is on the order of "1 << (N - 1)".  So with just
> 32 cpus the cost is on the order of a few billions of checks.
> 
> And then you have to factor in all of those runqueue locks's backwards
> graphs that don't involve other runqueue locks (on my machine each
> such sub-graph is about 200 locks deep).
> 
> Here is an updated version of my patch to solve this problem.  The only
> unnice bit is that I had to move the procfs dep counting code into
> lockdep.c and run it under the lockdep_lock.  This is the only way to
> safely employ the dependency generation ID marking algorithm the
> short-circuiting uses.
> 
> If we can agree on this as a fix, it should definitely be backported
> and submitted for -stable :-)

Way cool stuff - will try and wrap my brains around it asap.