Re: [RFC][PATCHv3 2/5] printk: introduce printing kernel thread

Sergey Senozhatsky
2017-06-01T09:20:07Z

On (06/01/17 16:21), Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> On (05/31/17 16:30), Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> > On (05/29/17 14:12), Jan Kara wrote:
> > [..]
> > > Actually I had something very similar in old versions of my patch set. And
> > > it didn't work very well. The problem was that e.g. sometimes scheduler
> > > decided that printk kthread should run on the same CPU as the process
> > > currently doing printing and in such case printk kthread never took over
> > > printing and the machine locked up due to heavy printing.
> >
> > hm, interesting.
>
> that's a tricky problem to deal with.
>
>
>
> ... so may be we can have per-CPU printk kthreads then
>
> static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct task_struct *, printk_kthread);
>
>
> SMP hotplug threads, to be precise, the same way as watchdog has it. and
> then during offloading we can wake_up any printk_kthread that is knowingly
> not from this-CPU, all of them, let them compete for the console_sem.
>
> just a quick idea.
>
> thoughts?

and we, of course, can provide a user space knob to enforce cpumask
of printk_kthreads, if someone doesn't want to have too many printk
kthreads (e.g. a system with 200 CPUs). so we can wake_up printk_kthread
only on given CPUs.

so I hacked a quick and dirty version of printing offloading using smp
threads, ran some tests and it seems to work better then the version
with a single printk_kthread.

overall this looks like the right direction. to me. well, I may be
wrong.

-ss