Re: [RFC] Make need_resched() return true when rcu_urgent_qs requested

Paul E. McKenney
2018-07-16T15:38:00Z

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 09:17:04AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 05:53:51AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 01:00:42PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, 2018-07-11 at 14:08 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Also... why in $DEITY's name was the existing
> > > > > rcu_virt_note_context_switch() not actually sufficient? If we had that
> > > > > there, why did we need an additional explicit calls to rcu_all_qs() in
> > > > > the KVM loop, or the more complex fixes to need_resched() which
> > > > > ultimately had the same effect, to avoid ten-second latencies?
> > > >
> > > > My guess is that this was because control passed through the
> > > > rcu_virt_note_context_switch() only once, and then subsequent
> > > > scheduling-clock interrupts bypassed this code.
> >
> > Gah! My guess was instead that the code did a rcu_kvm_enter() going in,
> > but somehow managed to miss the rcu_kvm_exit() going out. But that makes
> > absolutely no sense -- had that happened, rcutorture would likely have
> > screamed bloody murder, loudly and often. No mere near misses!
> >
> > And besides, thus far, -ENOREPRODUCE. :-/
>
> OK, one close call in 63 hours of rcutorture, this one on scenario TREE03
> (yesterday hit TREE01 and TREE03). Time for probabilitistic long-runtime
> bisection. Plus thought about how to get more information out of the near
> misses. Fun! ;-)

Most of the weekend was devoted to testing today's upcoming pull request,
but I did get a bit more testing done on this.

I was able to make this happen more often by tweaking rcutorture a
bit, but I still do not yet have statistically significant results.
Nevertheless, I have thus far only seen failures with David's patch or
with both David's and my patch. And I actually got a full-up rcutorture
failure (a too-short grace period) in addition to the aforementioned
close calls.

Over this coming week I expect to devote significant testing time to
the commit just prior to David's in my stack. If I don't see failures
on that commit, we will need to spent some quality time with the KVM
folks on whether or not kvm_x86_ops->run() and friends have the option of
failing to return, but instead causing control to pop up somewhere else.
Or someone could tell me how I am being blind to some obvious bug in
the two commits that allow RCU to treat KVM guest-OS execution as an
extended quiescent state. ;-)

Thanx, Paul