[PATCH 3.14 21/59] kernel/watchdog.c: remove preemption restrictions when restarting lockup detector

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2014-07-04T22:20:54Z

From: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>

commit bde92cf455a03a91badb7046855592d8c008e929 upstream.

Peter Wu noticed the following splat on his machine when updating
/proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh:

BUG: sleeping function called from invalid context at mm/slub.c:965
in_atomic(): 1, irqs_disabled(): 0, pid: 1, name: init
3 locks held by init/1:
#0: (sb_writers#3){.+.+.+}, at: [<ffffffff8117b663>] vfs_write+0x143/0x180
#1: (watchdog_proc_mutex){+.+.+.}, at: [<ffffffff810e02d3>] proc_dowatchdog+0x33/0x110
#2: (cpu_hotplug.lock){.+.+.+}, at: [<ffffffff810589c2>] get_online_cpus+0x32/0x80
Preemption disabled at:[<ffffffff810e0384>] proc_dowatchdog+0xe4/0x110

CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: init Not tainted 3.16.0-rc1-testing #34
Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS Bochs 01/01/2011
Call Trace:
dump_stack+0x4e/0x7a
__might_sleep+0x11d/0x190
kmem_cache_alloc_trace+0x4e/0x1e0
perf_event_alloc+0x55/0x440
perf_event_create_kernel_counter+0x26/0xe0
watchdog_nmi_enable+0x75/0x140
update_timers_all_cpus+0x53/0xa0
proc_dowatchdog+0xe4/0x110
proc_sys_call_handler+0xb3/0xc0
proc_sys_write+0x14/0x20
vfs_write+0xad/0x180
SyS_write+0x49/0xb0
system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b
NMI watchdog: disabled (cpu0): hardware events not enabled

What happened is after updating the watchdog_thresh, the lockup detector
is restarted to utilize the new value. Part of this process involved
disabling preemption. Once preemption was disabled, perf tried to
allocate a new event (as part of the restart). This caused the above
BUG_ON as you can't sleep with preemption disabled.

The preemption restriction seemed agressive as we are not doing anything
on that particular cpu, but with all the online cpus (which are
protected by the get_online_cpus lock). Remove the restriction and the
BUG_ON goes away.

Signed-off-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Reported-by: Peter Wu <peter@lekensteyn.nl>
Tested-by: Peter Wu <peter@lekensteyn.nl>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

---
kernel/watchdog.c | 2 --
1 file changed, 2 deletions(-)

--- a/kernel/watchdog.c
+++ b/kernel/watchdog.c
@@ -524,10 +524,8 @@ static void update_timers_all_cpus(void)
int cpu;

get_online_cpus();
- preempt_disable();
for_each_online_cpu(cpu)
update_timers(cpu);
- preempt_enable();
put_online_cpus();
}