Re: [PATCH 1/2] spi: atmel: Do not cancel a transfer upon any signal

[Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>]

----- Ursprüngliche Mail -----
> Von: "Miquel Raynal" <miquel.raynal@bootlin.com>
> + Richard, my dear jffs2 expert ;)

:-S

> 
> ronald.wahl@raritan.com wrote on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 18:54:40 +0100:
> 
>> On 27.11.23 16:10, Ronald Wahl wrote:
>> > On 27.11.23 10:58, Miquel Raynal wrote:
>> >> The intended move from wait_for_completion_*() to
>> >> wait_for_completion_interruptible_*() was to allow (very) long spi memor
>> y
>> >> transfers to be stopped upon user request instead of freezing the
>> >> machine forever as the timeout value could now be significantly bigger.
>> >>
>> >> However, depending on the user logic, applications can receive many
>> >> signals for their own "internal" purpose and have nothing to do with the
>> >> requested kernel operations, hence interrupting spi transfers upon any
>> >> signal is probably not a wise choice. Instead, let's switch to
>> >> wait_for_completion_killable_*() to only catch the "important"
>> >> signals. This was likely the intended behavior anyway.
>> >
>> > Actually this seems to work. But aborting a process that has a SPI
>> > transfer running causes ugly messages from kernel. This is somehow
>> > unexpected:
>> >
>> > # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/flashdisk/testfile bs=1024 count=512
>> > ^C[  380.726760] spi-nor spi0.0: spi transfer canceled
>> > [  380.731688] spi-nor spi0.0: SPI transfer failed: -512
>> > [  380.737141] spi_master spi0: failed to transfer one message from queue
>> > [  380.746495] spi-nor spi0.0: spi transfer canceled
>> > [  380.751549] spi-nor spi0.0: SPI transfer failed: -512
>> > [  380.756844] spi_master spi0: failed to transfer one message from queue
>> >
>> > JFFS2 also logs an informational message which is less visible but also
>> > may rise eyebrows:
>> > [  380.743904] jffs2: Write of 4164 bytes at 0x0016a47c failed. retu
>> rned
>> > -512, retlen 68

Ugly kernel messages are a normal consequence of killing an IO.
Chances are good that we'll find bugs in the upper layers.

>> > Killing a process is something to expect in certain cases and it should
>> > not cause such messages which may create some anxiety that something bad
>> > had happened. So maybe the "kill" case should be silent (e.g. level
>> > "debug")
>> > but without out hiding real errors. But even when hiding the message in t
>> he
>> > SPI framework it may cause additional messages in upper layers like JFFS2
>> .
>> > I'm not sure whether all of this is a good idea. This is something others
>> > have to decide.
>> 
>> ... and now I just got a crash when unmounting and remounting jffs2:
>> 
>> unmount:
>> [ 8245.821105] spi-nor spi0.0: spi transfer canceled
>> [ 8245.826288] spi-nor spi0.0: SPI transfer failed: -512
>> [ 8245.831508] spi_master spi0: failed to transfer one message from queue
>> [ 8245.838484] jffs2: Write of 1092 bytes at 0x00181458 failed. returned -5
>> 12, retlen 68
>> [ 8245.839786] spi-nor spi0.0: spi transfer canceled
>> [ 8245.844759] spi-nor spi0.0: SPI transfer failed: -512
>> [ 8245.850145] spi_master spi0: failed to transfer one message from queue
>> [ 8245.856909] jffs2: Write of 1092 bytes at 0x0018189c failed. returned -5
>> 12, retlen 0
>> [ 8245.856942] jffs2: Not marking the space at 0x0018189c as dirty because the
>> flash driver returned retlen zero

jffs2 has a garbage collect thread which can be controlled using various signals.
To terminate the thread, jffs2 sends SIGKILL upon umount.
If the gc thread does IO while that, you gonna kill the IO too.
 
>> mount:
>> [ 8831.213456] jffs2: error: (1142) jffs2_link_node_ref: Adding new ref 28b
>> d9da7 at (0x000ad578-0x000ae5bc) not immediately after previous (0x000ad578
>> -0x000ad578)
>> [ 8831.228212] Internal error: Oops - undefined instruction: 0 [#1] THUMB2


I fear this is a jffs2 (summary feature) bug. Chances are great that you're able
to trigger the very same using a sudden loss of power.

> It's not just spi-atmel, any spi-mem controller might be tempted to use
> interruptible^Wkillable transfers just because the timeout values can
> be really big as the memory sizes increase.
> 
> One solution is to change the completion helpers back to something
> non-killable/non-interruptible, but the user experience will be
> slightly degraded. The other would be to look into jffs2 (if it's the
> only filesystem playing with signals during unmount, tbh I don't know).
> But maybe this signaling mechanism can't be hacked for compatibility
> reasons. Handling this at the spi level would be a mix of layers, I'm
> not ready for that.
> 
> Richard, Mark, what's your opinion here?

I *think* we can remove the signal handling code from jffs2 since it makes
already use of the kthread_should_stop() API.
That way we can keep the SPI transfer interruptible by signals.
...reading right now into the history to figure better.


Thanks,
//richard