Re: Question about a8ea6fc9b089 ("sched: Stop PF_NO_SETAFFINITY from being inherited by various init system threads")

Paul E. McKenney
2021-06-11T13:52:09Z

On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 11:12:29AM +0100, Valentin Schneider wrote:
> On 10/06/21 13:17, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 07:28:57PM +0100, Valentin Schneider wrote:
> >> On 10/06/21 10:04, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >> > Hello, Frederic,
> >> >
> >> > This commit works well, but has the unfortunate side-effect of making
> >> > smp_processor_id() complain when used in a preemptible region even
> >> > though the kthread has been pinned onto a single CPU by a call to
> >> > set_cpus_allowed_ptr(). (Which did return success.)
> >> >
> >>
> >> On which tree are you encountering this?
> >
> > I bisected to this commit in -next tag next-20210609, and this commit
> > could of course be an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire.
> >
> >> Looking at check_preemption_disabled() and CPU affinity, v5.13-rc5 has:
> >>
> >> /*
> >> * Kernel threads bound to a single CPU can safely use
> >> * smp_processor_id():
> >> */
> >> if (current->nr_cpus_allowed == 1)
> >> goto out;
> >>
> >> tip/sched/core additionally hinges that on PF_NO_SETAFFINITY:
> >>
> >> 570a752b7a9b ("lib/smp_processor_id: Use is_percpu_thread() instead of nr_cpus_allowed")
> >>
> >> The former shouldn't be affected by Frederic's patch, and the latter should
> >> only cause warnings if the pinned task isn't a "proper" kthread (thus
> >> doesn't have PF_NO_SETAFFINITY)... Exceptions that come to mind are things
> >> like UMH which doesn't use kthread_create().
> >
> > And reverting 570a752b7a9b ("lib/smp_processor_id: Use is_percpu_thread()
> > instead of nr_cpus_allowed") causes the kernel to once again be OK with
> > smp_processor_id(), so thank you! And apologies to Frederic for the
> > false alarm.
> >
> > Added Yejune on CC. Thoughts?
> >
>
> The way I see 570a752b7a9b is that, if a task is pinned to a single CPU but
> doesn't have PF_NO_SETAFFINITY, then userspace can unpin it. This means it
> ought to have entered check_preemption_disabled() with preemption disabled
> - right now it may be pinned, but that can change at any minute, and
> whatever code it is running needs to cope with that.

Thank you for catching me up on this topic!

> Could you share some details on which tasks you are hitting this with?

Let's start with ref_scale_reader() in kernel/rcu/refscale.c. This
is for fine-grained in-kernel benchmarking, so it really wants kthreads
running this function to be pinned.

I took a look at kthread_bind(), but it is not intended to be called by
the kthread itself. Looking elsewhere in the kernel, it looks like I
just do this right after invoking set_cpus_allowed_ptr():

current->flags != PF_NO_SETAFFINITY;

Or am I missing a better way to handle this?

Thanx, Paul