[PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.9 059/219] sysrq: Reset the watchdog timers while displaying high-resolution timers

Sasha Levin
2018-03-03T22:32:24Z

From: Tom Hromatka <tom.hromatka@oracle.com>

[ Upstream commit 0107042768658fea9f5f5a9c00b1c90f5dab6a06 ]

On systems with a large number of CPUs, running sysrq- can cause
watchdog timeouts. There are two slow sections of code in the sysrq-
path in timer_list.c.

1. print_active_timers() - This function is called by print_cpu() and
contains a slow goto loop. On a machine with hundreds of CPUs, this
loop took approximately 100ms for the first CPU in a NUMA node.
(Subsequent CPUs in the same node ran much quicker.) The total time
to print all of the CPUs is ultimately long enough to trigger the
soft lockup watchdog.

2. print_tickdevice() - This function outputs a large amount of textual
information. This function also took approximately 100ms per CPU.

Since sysrq- is not a performance critical path, there should be no
harm in touching the nmi watchdog in both slow sections above. Touching
it in just one location was insufficient on systems with hundreds of
CPUs as occasional timeouts were still observed during testing.

This issue was observed on an Oracle T7 machine with 128 CPUs, but I
anticipate it may affect other systems with similarly large numbers of
CPUs.

Signed-off-by: Tom Hromatka <tom.hromatka@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Rob Gardner <rob.gardner@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <alexander.levin@microsoft.com>
---
kernel/time/timer_list.c | 6 ++++++
1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)

diff --git a/kernel/time/timer_list.c b/kernel/time/timer_list.c
index ba7d8b288bb3..ef4f16e81283 100644
--- a/kernel/time/timer_list.c
+++ b/kernel/time/timer_list.c
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@
#include <linux/sched.h>
#include <linux/seq_file.h>
#include <linux/kallsyms.h>
+#include <linux/nmi.h>

#include <asm/uaccess.h>

@@ -96,6 +97,9 @@ print_active_timers(struct seq_file *m, struct hrtimer_clock_base *base,

next_one:
i = 0;
+
+ touch_nmi_watchdog();
+
raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&base->cpu_base->lock, flags);

curr = timerqueue_getnext(&base->active);
@@ -207,6 +211,8 @@ print_tickdevice(struct seq_file *m, struct tick_device *td, int cpu)
{
struct clock_event_device *dev = td->evtdev;

+ touch_nmi_watchdog();
+
SEQ_printf(m, "Tick Device: mode: %d\n", td->mode);
if (cpu < 0)
SEQ_printf(m, "Broadcast device\n");
--
2.14.1