RE: hung_task checking and sys_sync

[Sadasivan Shaiju <sshaiju@mvista.com>]

There   was  another  patch   addressing  these  type  of  issue .

https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/1/12/18


regards,
shaiju.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mandeep Baines [mailto:msb@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 3:45 PM
To: Daniel Walker
Cc: fweisbec@gmail.com; sshaiju@mvista.com; mingo@elte.hu;
akpm@linux-foundation.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: hung_task checking and sys_sync

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Daniel Walker <dwalker@fifo99.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 03:29:12PM -0700, Mandeep Singh Baines wrote:
>>
>> But the time is not unbounded. You could mask the hung_task_detector
>> for this case but then you lose the ability to catch bugs in this code
path.
>>
>> The timeout is configurable via
/proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs.
>> Can you bump up the value at boot via sysctl.conf?
>
> Maybe, but I'm wondering if these types should just be stopped because
> Andrew had complained about them already.
>

Fair enough. Actually, internally I had a patch where we'd use a task flag
to disable and enable the hang check but the approach in the patch you
pointed me to seems better.

>> > Has there been any commit that disable these messages bdi_sched_wait?
>> >
>>
>> No. There is no mechanism to disable hung_task for a specific code
path.
>> We do skip processes if PF_PROZEN or PF_FROZEN_SKIP is set but that
>> is really a different situation where the wait is unbounded.
>
> There is presidence for this type of change,
>
> Author: Mark Lord <kernel@teksavvy.com>
> Date:   Fri Sep 24 09:51:13 2010 -0400
>
>    block: Prevent hang_check firing during long I/O
>
>    During long I/O operations, the hang_check timer may fire,
>    trigger stack dumps that unnecessarily alarm the user.
>
>    Eg.  hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sdb  ## can take *hours* to
> complete
>
>    So, if hang_check is armed, we should wake up periodically
>    to prevent it from triggering.  This patch uses a wake-up interval
>    equal to half the hang_check timer period, which keeps overhead low
enough.
>
>    Signed-off-by: Mark Lord <mlord@pobox.com>
>    Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
>

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this patch. Maybe we could abstract this
approach via wait_for_completion_no_hang_check().

Regards,
Mandeep