Re: [PATCH 2/5] kernel.h: Add non_block_start/end()

Jason Gunthorpe
2019-08-15T14:38:03Z

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 03:12:11PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 3:04 PM Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 10:44:29AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> >
> > > As the oom reaper is the primary guarantee of the oom handling forward
> > > progress it cannot be blocked on anything that might depend on blockable
> > > memory allocations. These are not really easy to track because they
> > > might be indirect - e.g. notifier blocks on a lock which other context
> > > holds while allocating memory or waiting for a flusher that needs memory
> > > to perform its work.
> >
> > But lockdep *does* track all this and fs_reclaim_acquire() was created
> > to solve exactly this problem.
> >
> > fs_reclaim is a lock and it flows through all the usual lockdep
> > schemes like any other lock. Any time the page allocator wants to do
> > something the would deadlock with reclaim it takes the lock.
> >
> > Failure is expressed by a deadlock cycle in the lockdep map, and
> > lockdep can handle arbitary complexity through layers of locks, work
> > queues, threads, etc.
> >
> > What is missing?
>
> Lockdep doens't seen everything by far. E.g. a wait_event will be
> caught by the annotations here, but not by lockdep.

Sure, but the wait_event might be OK if its progress isn't contingent
on fs_reclaim, ie triggered from interrupt, so why ban it?

> And since we're talking about mmu notifiers here and gpus/dma engines.
> We have dma_fence_wait, which can wait for any hw/driver in the system
> that takes part in shared/zero-copy buffer processing. Which at least
> on the graphics side is everything. This pulls in enormous amounts of
> deadlock potential that lockdep simply is blind about and will never
> see.

It seems very risky to entagle a notifier widely like that.

It looks pretty sure that notifiers are fs_reclaim, so at a minimum
that wait_event can't be contingent on anything that is doing
GFP_KERNEL or it will deadlock - and blockable doesn't make that sleep
safe.

Avoiding an uncertain wait_event under notifiers would seem to be the
only reasonable design here..

Jason