Re: freeze during boot regression Re: [PATCH 6.12 000/265] 6.12.77-rc1 review

Barry K. Nathan
2026-03-13T10:53:46Z

(I forgot to add Francesco Dolcini as a recipient on my previous email,
so I'm doing that now.)

On 3/13/26 02:37, Ron Economos wrote:
> On 3/13/26 01:05, Barry K. Nathan wrote:
>> On 3/12/26 23:10, Ron Economos wrote:
>>> Probably those sched/fair patches.
>>
>> Yes, after bisecting it turned out to be
>> sched-fair-fix-eevdf-entity-placement-bug-causing-sc.patch
>>
>> Taking 6.12.77-rc1 and reverting both of the sched-fair patches
>> results in a working kernel that boots consistently (which I am
>> using now to send this email).
>
> Confirmed on RISC-V. Reverting "sched/fair: Fix lag clamp" commit b547745a2c78fd1cc1fdc6a0d1b05c884c05cec2 and "sched/fair: Fix EEVDF entity placement bug causing scheduling lag" commit f9891a33ba67ce40e5a17023d2f3a5e2b7d72ffd resolves the issue.

After looking into it a bit more, I found two upstream commits that
should fix this issue without reverting the two sched/fair patches
(either of the two commits alone should fix it if I understand
the bug and the code correctly):

commit 4423af84b29794a9bd2bd07188d8e71083e54c61
sched/fair: optimize the PLACE_LAG when se->vlag is zero

commit c70fc32f44431bb30f9025ce753ba8be25acbba3
sched/fair: Adhere to place_entity() constraints

I think c70fc32f4443 is theoretically the proper fix, while
4423af84b297 is a performance optimization that just happens to also
fix the bug.

4423af84b297 turned out to be the easier backport; the upstream patch
applies to 6.12.77-rc1 with an offset but no fuzz or conflicts. So I
tried 6.12.77-rc1 + 4423af84b297, and just as with reverting the two
sched/fair patches, it eliminates the boot freeze in my testing. It's
what I'm running now as I write and send this email.

Next, I think I'll try doing a backport of c70fc32f4443 (I think it
should be easy enough), and I'll try testing 6.12.77-rc1 +
c70fc32f4443 (probably both with and without 4423af84b297).
Maybe 4423af84b297 on its own is enough though.
--
-Barry K. Nathan <barryn@pobox.com>