Patch "sysrq: Reset the watchdog timers while displaying high-resolution timers" has been added to the 4.4-stable tree

[<gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

    sysrq: Reset the watchdog timers while displaying high-resolution timers

to the 4.4-stable tree which can be found at:
    http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
     sysrq-reset-the-watchdog-timers-while-displaying-high-resolution-timers.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.4 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree,
please let <stable@vger.kernel.org> know about it.


>From foo@baz Mon Mar 19 09:58:12 CET 2018
From: Tom Hromatka <tom.hromatka@oracle.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 15:28:04 -0700
Subject: sysrq: Reset the watchdog timers while displaying high-resolution timers

From: Tom Hromatka <tom.hromatka@oracle.com>


[ Upstream commit 0107042768658fea9f5f5a9c00b1c90f5dab6a06 ]

On systems with a large number of CPUs, running sysrq-<q> can cause
watchdog timeouts.  There are two slow sections of code in the sysrq-<q>
path in timer_list.c.

1. print_active_timers() - This function is called by print_cpu() and
   contains a slow goto loop.  On a machine with hundreds of CPUs, this
   loop took approximately 100ms for the first CPU in a NUMA node.
   (Subsequent CPUs in the same node ran much quicker.)  The total time
   to print all of the CPUs is ultimately long enough to trigger the
   soft lockup watchdog.

2. print_tickdevice() - This function outputs a large amount of textual
   information.  This function also took approximately 100ms per CPU.

Since sysrq-<q> is not a performance critical path, there should be no
harm in touching the nmi watchdog in both slow sections above.  Touching
it in just one location was insufficient on systems with hundreds of
CPUs as occasional timeouts were still observed during testing.

This issue was observed on an Oracle T7 machine with 128 CPUs, but I
anticipate it may affect other systems with similarly large numbers of
CPUs.

Signed-off-by: Tom Hromatka <tom.hromatka@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Rob Gardner <rob.gardner@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <alexander.levin@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
---
 kernel/time/timer_list.c |    6 ++++++
 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)

--- a/kernel/time/timer_list.c
+++ b/kernel/time/timer_list.c
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@
 #include <linux/sched.h>
 #include <linux/seq_file.h>
 #include <linux/kallsyms.h>
+#include <linux/nmi.h>
 
 #include <asm/uaccess.h>
 
@@ -96,6 +97,9 @@ print_active_timers(struct seq_file *m,
 
 next_one:
 	i = 0;
+
+	touch_nmi_watchdog();
+
 	raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&base->cpu_base->lock, flags);
 
 	curr = timerqueue_getnext(&base->active);
@@ -207,6 +211,8 @@ print_tickdevice(struct seq_file *m, str
 {
 	struct clock_event_device *dev = td->evtdev;
 
+	touch_nmi_watchdog();
+
 	SEQ_printf(m, "Tick Device: mode:     %d\n", td->mode);
 	if (cpu < 0)
 		SEQ_printf(m, "Broadcast device\n");


Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from tom.hromatka@oracle.com are

queue-4.4/sysrq-reset-the-watchdog-timers-while-displaying-high-resolution-timers.patch