Re: floppy.c soft lockup

Oleg Nesterov
2007-06-13T16:17:42Z

Sorry for delay,

On 06/07, Mark Hounschell wrote:
>
> >From an earlier thread member:
>
> >> Mark writes:
> >> Again I don't understand why flush_scheduled_work() running on behalf
> >> of a process affinitized to processor-1 requires cooperation from
> >> events/2 (affinitized to processor-2)
> >> when there is an events/1 already affinitized to processor 1?
>
> >Oleg write:
> >flush_workqueue() blocks until any scheduled work on any CPU has run to
> >completion. If we have some work_struct pending on CPU 2, it can be
> >completed only when events/2 executes it.
>
> Could not flush_scheduled_work() just follow the affinity mask of the
> task that caused the call to begin with. If calling task had a cpu-mask
> of 3 then flush_scheduled_work() would do the events/0 and events/1
> thing and if the calling task had an affinity mask of 1 then only
> events/0 would be done?
>
> In other words changing what Oleg says above just slightly:
>
> flush_workqueue() blocks until any scheduled work on any CPU in the
> calling tasks affinity mask has run to completion?

No, we can't do this, this makes flush_workqueue() meaningless.

Even if we could, this can't help. Suppose that a kernel thread takes some
global lock (for example, in our case cache_reap() takes cache_chain_mutex)
and then it is preempted by RT task which doesn't relinquish CPU.

So this problem is "wider", flush_workqueue() was just a random victim.

Oleg.