Fix for race leading to endless timer interrupts related to

configtimer().

During normal operation "state->nextcallopt" will always be less than
or equal to "state->nextcall" and checking only "state->nextcallopt"
before calling "callout_process()" is sufficient. However when
"configtimer()" is called a race might happen requiring both of these
binary times to be checked.

Short description of race:

1) A configtimer() call will reset both "state->nextcall" and
"state->nextcallopt" to the same binary time.

2) If a "callout_reset()" call happens between "configtimer()" and the
next "callout_process()" call, "state->nextcallopt" will get updated
and "state->nextcall" will remain at the current time. Refer to logic
inside cpu_new_callout().

3) getnextcpuevent() only respects "state->nextcall" and returns this
value over and over again, even if it is in the past, until "now >=
state->nextcallopt" becomes true. Then these two time variables are
corrected by a "callout_process()" call and the situation goes back to
normal.

The problem manifests itself in different ways. The common factor is
the timer process(es) consume all CPU on one or more CPU cores for a
long time, blocking other kernel processes from getting execution
time. This can be seen by very high interrupt counts as displayed by
"vmstat -i | grep timer" right after boot.

When EARLY_AP_STARTUP was enabled in r310177 the likelyhood of hitting
this bug apparently increased.

Example output from "vmstat -i" before patch:
cpu0:timer                          7591         69
cpu9:timer                      39031773     358089
cpu4:timer                          9359         85
cpu3:timer                          9100         83
cpu2:timer                          9620         88

Example output from "vmstat -i" after patch:
cpu0:timer                          4242         34
cpu6:timer                          5531         44
cpu3:timer                          6450         52
cpu1:timer                          4545         36
cpu9:timer                          7153         58

Before the patch cpu9 in the example above, was spinning in a loop in
order to reach 39 million interrupts just a few seconds after
bootup. After the patch the timer interrupt counts are more or less
consistent.

Discussed with:		mav @
Reported by:		several people
MFC after:		1 week
Sponsored by:		Mellanox Technologies
This commit is contained in:
Hans Petter Selasky 2017-01-20 17:40:31 +00:00
parent 7fd5cf0544
commit 10c8755706

View File

@ -207,7 +207,7 @@ handleevents(sbintime_t now, int fake)
}
} else
state->nextprof = state->nextstat;
if (now >= state->nextcallopt) {
if (now >= state->nextcallopt || now >= state->nextcall) {
state->nextcall = state->nextcallopt = SBT_MAX;
callout_process(now);
}