Re: IRQ off latency of printk is very high

Mathieu Desnoyers
2007-11-01T15:27:33Z

* Pavel Machek (pavel@ucw.cz) wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > > Hmm, I see this at the beginning of the post-BK era (2.6.12-rc2):
> > >
> > > spin_lock_irqsave(&logbuf_lock, flags);
> > > ...
> > > spin_unlock(&logbuf_lock);
> > > call_console_drivers(_con_start, _log_end);
> > > local_irq_restore(flags);
> > >
> >
> > Well, I need to do some more research. This must be in
> > release_console_sem(). I was looking at vprintk, through
> > the ages. At 2.6.16, it looked like this:
> >
> > spin_lock_irqsave(&logbuf_lock, flags);
> > ...
> > spin_unlock_irqrestore(&logbuf_lock, flags);
> > console_may_schedule = 0;
> > release_console_sem();
> >
> > but the irq restore has been moving around to different places
> > in that function over the last few years. I suspect that in the
> > common case the irqsave in vprintk is the one that disables
> > ints.
> >
> > It appears that formerly interrupts were enabled in vprintk but
> > re-disabled immediately upon entering release_console_sem().
> > As it is now, they're held during formatting, buffering,
> > and output, which seems excessive.
> >
> > It seems draconian to drain the entire buffer with ints disabled.
> > Is it possible to break this up and send out smaller chunks
> > at a time? Maybe by putting a chunk loop in release_console_sem()?
>
> Well, I believe someone got
>
> DDetetccctted ed 113223 HHzz CPUCPU
>
> in his dmesg, and now we have this 'draconian' locking. How can we
> prevent mangled messages without it?
> Pavel

The main interest seems to be to protect from mixed printk output
between different CPUs in process context. I don't think it would be
that bad if interrupts come and output error messages in the middle of a
printk, isn't it ?

therefore, could we do something like :

if (!in_irq())
spin_lock(&logbuf_lock);
...
if (!in_irq())
spin_unlock(&logbuf_lock);

? (yes, this is a crazy idea)

Mathieu

> --
> (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
> (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
Computer Engineering Ph.D. Student, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68