Re: [PATCH] softirq: Provide a handshake for canceling tasklets via polling on PREEMPT_RT

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello,

On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 12:55:18PM +0200, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> On 2025-08-20 12:36:59 [+0200], To Tejun Heo wrote:
> > Subject: [PATCH] workqueue: Provide a handshake for canceling BH workers
> …
> > This will flush all BH-work items assigned to that pool.
> 
> We need to flush all items because the inserted wq_barrier is at the
> end of the queue. So if the cb_lock is dropped after
> worker->current_func(work) then we will live lock. Just tested, I
> somehow assumed it polls on worker.

Is flushing all a problem tho? I think the main focus is keeping the
semantics matching on RT, right?

...
> -	if (from_cancel) {
> +	if (from_cancel && !IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT)) {
>  		unsigned long data = *work_data_bits(work);
>  
>  		if (!WARN_ON_ONCE(data & WORK_STRUCT_PWQ) &&
>  		    (data & WORK_OFFQ_BH)) {
> -			/*
> -			 * On RT, prevent a live lock when %current preempted
> -			 * soft interrupt processing or prevents ksoftirqd from
> -			 * running by keeping flipping BH. If the BH work item
> -			 * runs on a different CPU then this has no effect other
> -			 * than doing the BH disable/enable dance for nothing.
> -			 * This is copied from
> -			 * kernel/softirq.c::tasklet_unlock_spin_wait().
> -			 */
>  			while (!try_wait_for_completion(&barr.done)) {
> -				if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT)) {
> -					local_bh_disable();
> -					local_bh_enable();
> -				} else {
> -					cpu_relax();
> -				}
> +				cpu_relax();

I'm most likely missing something about RT but wouldn't the above still lead
to deadlocks if the caller is non-hardirq but higher priority thread?

Thanks.

-- 
tejun