Re: [PATCH] torture: Fix hang during kthread shutdown phase

[Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2023 at 10:04:04AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 08:43:10AM -0800, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
> > On Sun, 01 Jan 2023, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:
> > 
> > > During shutdown of rcutorture, the shutdown thread in
> > > rcu_torture_cleanup() calls torture_cleanup_begin() which sets fullstop
> > > to FULLSTOP_RMMOD. This is enough to cause the rcutorture threads for
> > > readers and fakewriters to breakout of their main while loop and start
> > > shutting down.
> > > 
> > > Once out of their main loop, they then call torture_kthread_stopping()
> > > which in turn waits for kthread_stop() to be called, however
> > > rcu_torture_cleanup() has not even called kthread_stop() on those
> > > threads yet, it does that a bit later.  However, before it gets a chance
> > > to do so, torture_kthread_stopping() calls
> > > schedule_timeout_interruptible(1) in a tight loop. Tracing confirmed
> > > this makes the timer softirq constantly execute timer callbacks, while
> > > never returning back to the softirq exit path and is essentially "locked
> > > up" because of that. If the softirq preempts the shutdown thread,
> > > kthread_stop() may never be called.
> > > 
> > > This commit improves the situation dramatically, by increasing timeout
> > > passed to schedule_timeout_interruptible() 1/20th of a second. This
> > > causes the timer softirq to not lock up a CPU and everything works fine.
> > > Testing has shown 100 runs of TREE07 passing reliably, which was not the
> > > case before because of RCU stalls.
> > > 
> > > Cc: Paul McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
> > > Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
> > > Cc: Zhouyi Zhou <zhouzhouyi@gmail.com>
> > > Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 6.0.x
> > > Signed-off-by: Joel Fernandes (Google) <joel@joelfernandes.org>
> > 
> > Reviewed-by: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
> 
> Queued for further review and testing, thank you all!
> 
> One thing still puzzles me.  Assuming HZ=1000 and given 16 CPUs, each
> timer hander must have consumed many tens of microseconds in order
> to keep the system busy, which seems a bit longer than it should be.
> Or am I underestimating the number of tasks involved?

Here are the traces between successive calls to process_timeout() which is the timer callback handler:

[ 1320.444210]   <idle>-0         0dNs.. 314229620us : __run_timers: Calling timerfn 5: process_timeout
[ 1320.444215]   <idle>-0         0dNs.. 314229620us : sched_waking: comm=rcu_torture_fak pid=145 prio=139 target_cpu=008
[ 1320.463393]   <idle>-0         7d.... 314229655us : sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/7 prev_pid=0 prev_prio=120 prev_state=R ==> next_comm=rcu_torture_wri next_pid=144 next_prio=120
[ 1320.478870] rcu_tort-144       7d.... 314229658us : sched_switch: prev_comm=rcu_torture_wri prev_pid=144 prev_prio=120 prev_state=D ==> next_comm=swapper/7 next_pid=0 next_prio=120
[ 1320.494324]   <idle>-0         0dNs.. 314229738us : __run_timers: Calling timerfn 6: process_timeout

It appears the time delta in the above occurrence is 118 micro seconds
between 2 timer callbacks. It does appear to be doing a cross-CPU wake up.
Maybe that adds to the long time?

Here are the full logs with traces (in case it helps, search for "=D" for the
D-state sched_switch event before the "panic now" trace happens):
http://box.joelfernandes.org:9080/job/rcutorture_stable/job/linux-6.0.y/26/artifact/tools/testing/selftests/rcutorture/res/2022.12.31-23.04.42/TREE07.2/console.log

thanks,

 - Joel