Re: Question on handling managed IRQs when hotplugging CPUs

[Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.com>]

On 1/29/19 12:25 PM, John Garry wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a question on $subject which I hope you can shed some light on.
> 
> According to commit c5cb83bb337c25 ("genirq/cpuhotplug: Handle managed 
> IRQs on CPU hotplug"), if we offline the last CPU in a managed IRQ 
> affinity mask, the IRQ is shutdown.
> 
> The reasoning is that this IRQ is thought to be associated with a 
> specific queue on a MQ device, and the CPUs in the IRQ affinity mask are 
> the same CPUs associated with the queue. So, if no CPU is using the 
> queue, then no need for the IRQ.
> 
> However how does this handle scenario of last CPU in IRQ affinity mask 
> being offlined while IO associated with queue is still in flight?
> 
> Or if we make the decision to use queue associated with the current CPU, 
> and then that CPU (being the last CPU online in the queue's IRQ 
> afffinity mask) goes offline and we finish the delivery with another CPU?
> 
> In these cases, when the IO completes, it would not be serviced and 
> timeout.
> 
> I have actually tried this on my arm64 system and I see IO timeouts.
> 
That actually is a very good question, and I have been wondering about 
this for quite some time.

I find it a bit hard to envision a scenario where the IRQ affinity is 
automatically (and, more importantly, atomically!) re-routed to one of 
the other CPUs.
And even it it were, chances are that there are checks in the driver 
_preventing_ them from handling those requests, seeing that they should 
have been handled by another CPU ...

I guess the safest bet is to implement a 'cleanup' worker queue which is 
responsible of looking through all the outstanding commands (on all 
hardware queues), and then complete those for which no corresponding CPU 
/ irqhandler can be found.

But I defer to the higher authorities here; maybe I'm totally wrong and 
it's already been taken care of.

But if there is no generic mechanism this really is a fit topic for 
LSF/MM, as most other drivers would be affected, too.

Cheers,

Hannes
-- 
Dr. Hannes Reinecke		               zSeries & Storage
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