Re: [PATCH 01/12] xfs: prevent NMI timeouts in cmn_err

Alex Elder
2011-01-12T04:13:11Z

On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 11:35 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> From: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
>
> We currently have a global error message buffer in cmn_err that is
> protected by a spin lock that disables interrupts. Recently there
> have been reports of NMI timeouts occurring when the console is
> being flooded by SCSI error reports due to cmn_err() getting stuck
> trying to print to the console while holding this lock (i.e. with
> interrupts disabled). The NMI watchdog is seeing this CPU as
> non-responding and so is triggering a panic. While the trigger for
> the reported case is SCSI errors, pretty much anything that spams
> the kernel log could cause this to occur.
>
> Realistically the only reason that we have the intemediate message
> buffer is to prepend the correct kernel log level prefix to the log
> message. The only reason we have the lock is to protect the global
> message buffer and the only reason the message buffer is global is
> to keep it off the stack. Hence if we can avoid needing a global
> message buffer we avoid needing the lock, and we can do this with a
> small amount of cleanup and some preprocessor tricks:
>
> 1. clean up xfs_cmn_err() panic mask functionality to avoid
> needing debug code in xfs_cmn_err()
> 2. remove the couple of "!" message prefixes that still exist that
> the existing cmn_err() code steps over.
> 3. redefine CE_* levels directly to KERN_*
> 4. redefine cmn_err() and friends to use printk() directly
> via variable argument length macros.
>
> By doing this, we can completely remove the cmn_err() code and the
> lock that is causing the problems, and rely solely on printk()
> serialisation to ensure that we don't get garbled messages.
>
> A series of followup patches is really needed to clean up all the
> cmn_err() calls and related messages properly, but that results in a
> series that is not easily back portable to enterprise kernels. Hence
> this initial fix is only to address the direct problem in the lowest
> impact way possible.

I had two trivial remarks but, well, what you have is just fine...

Reviewed-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>

> Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
> ---
> fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_sysctl.c | 23 ++++++++-
> fs/xfs/support/debug.c | 109 +++++++++++++++++++----------------------
> fs/xfs/support/debug.h | 25 ++++++---
>