Re: [PATCH] printk: rebalance printk

[Peter Hurley <peter@hurleysoftware.com>]

On 08/11/2015 02:16 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 07:23:01PM +0800, Pan Xinhui wrote:
>> From: Pan Xinhui <xinhuix.pan@intel.com>
>>
>> printk can be called in any context, It's very useful to output debug
>> info.
>>
>> But it might cause very bad issues on some special cases. For example,
>> some driver hit errors, and it dumps many messages like reg values, etc. 
>>
>> Sometimes, printk is called when irqs disabled. This is OKay if there is
>> a few messages. But What would happen if many messages outputted by other
>> drivers at same time.
>>
>> Here is the scenario.
>> CPUA					CPUB
>> 					local_irq_save(flags);
>> 					printk()
>> while(..) {					--> console_unlock
>> 	printk(...);			
>> 	//hundreds or thousands loops
>> }				//all messages flushed out to consoles
>> 					local_irq_restore(flags);
>>
> 
> Where are you seeing this type of scenario "in the wild"?  Or is this
> just a "debug/bringup hardware" issue?

There have been problem reports of big machines getting soft-lockup/RCU stall
warnings with serial console attached. I think SLES is carrying patches
from Jan Kara to try to workaround this issue.


> We shouldn't be ever stuck in a
> printk that prints hundreds or thousands of loops, if so, we need to fix
> the kernel code that does that, as we do have control over this.

The loop referred to here is the loop in console_unlock(). Essentially
what happens is one cpu can get trapped in the console_unlock() output
loop; printk()'s from other cpus are only appending to the logbuf since
they can't acquire the console_lock (which is owned by the one cpu trapped
in the output loop).

Regards,
Peter Hurley