Re: [Patch v2] sysfs: add lockdep class support to s_active

Eric W. Biederman
2010-02-05T09:39:23Z

Xiaotian Feng <xtfeng@gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Amerigo Wang <amwang@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Recently we met a lockdep warning from sysfs during s2ram or cpu hotplug.
>> As reported by several people, it is something like:
>>
>> [ 6967.926563] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S3
>> [ 6967.956156] Disabling non-boot CPUs ...
>> [ 6967.970401]
>> [ 6967.970408] =============================================
>> [ 6967.970419] [ INFO: possible recursive locking detected ]
>> [ 6967.970431] 2.6.33-rc2-git6 #27
>> [ 6967.970439] ---------------------------------------------
>> [ 6967.970450] pm-suspend/22147 is trying to acquire lock:
>> [ 6967.970460]  (s_active){++++.+}, at: [<c10d2941>]
>> sysfs_hash_and_remove+0x3d/0x4f
>> [ 6967.970493]
>> [ 6967.970497] but task is already holding lock:
>> [ 6967.970506]  (s_active){++++.+}, at: [<c10d4110>]
>> sysfs_get_active_two+0x16/0x36
>> [...]
>>
>> Eric already provides a patch for this[1], but it still can't fix the
>> problem. Based on his work and Peter's suggestion, I write this patch,
>> hopefully we can fix the warning completely.
>>
>> This patch put sysfs s_active into two classes, one is for PM, the other
>> is for the rest, so lockdep will distinguish them.
>
> I think this patch does not hit the root cause, we have a similiar
> warning which is not related with PM.

The root cause is that our locking is crazy complicated. No lockdep
changes are going to fix that.

What we can do and what the patch does is teach lockdep to treat some
of the sysfs files as a different group (subclass) from other sysfs
files. Which keeps us from overgeneralizing too much and having
a better signal to noise ratio.

As for the block device problem goes, I can't easily say that
the block layer is correct. I expect it is because changing
the scheduler is unlikely to delete block devices. If the block layer
has bugs then adding another subclass as Amerigo suggests should simply
make lockdep warnings harder to trigger and more accurate so that
sounds like a path worth walking.

In general I recommend that pieces of code that need to do a lot of
work in a sysfs attribute consider using a work queue or a kernel
thread, as that can be easier to analyze.

Eric