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Paul E. McKenney authored
Without special fail-safe quiescent-state-propagation checks, grace-period hangs can result from the following scenario: 1. CPU 1 goes offline. 2. Because CPU 1 is the only CPU in the system blocking the current grace period, the grace period ends as soon as rcu_cleanup_dying_idle_cpu()'s call to rcu_report_qs_rnp() returns. 3. At this point, the leaf rcu_node structure's ->lock is no longer held: rcu_report_qs_rnp() has released it, as it must in order to awaken the RCU grace-period kthread. 4. At this point, that same leaf rcu_node structure's ->qsmaskinitnext field still records CPU 1 as being online. This is absolutely necessary because the scheduler uses RCU (in this case on the wake-up path while awakening RCU's grace-period kthread), and ->qsmaskinitnext contains RCU's idea as to which CPUs are online. Therefore, invoking rcu_report_qs_rnp() after clearing CPU 1's bit from ->qsmaskinitnext would result in a lockdep-RCU splat due to RCU being used from an offline CPU. 5. RCU's grace-period kthread awakens, sees that the old grace period has completed and that a new one is needed. It therefore starts a new grace period, but because CPU 1's leaf rcu_node structure's ->qsmaskinitnext field still shows CPU 1 as being online, this new grace period is initialized to wait for a quiescent state from the now-offline CPU 1. 6. Without the fail-safe force-quiescent-state checks, there would be no quiescent state from the now-offline CPU 1, which would eventually result in RCU CPU stall warnings and memory exhaustion. It would be good to get rid of the special fail-safe quiescent-state propagation checks, and thus it would be good to fix things so that the above scenario cannot happen. This commit therefore adds a new ->ofl_lock to the rcu_state structure. This lock is held by rcu_gp_init() across the applying of buffered online and offline operations to the rcu_node tree, and it is also held by rcu_cleanup_dying_idle_cpu() when buffering a new offline operation. This prevents rcu_gp_init() from acquiring the leaf rcu_node structure's lock during the interval between when rcu_cleanup_dying_idle_cpu() invokes rcu_report_qs_rnp(), which releases ->lock and the re-acquisition of that same lock. This in turn prevents the failure scenario outlined above, and will hopefully eventually allow removal of the offline-CPU checks from the force-quiescent-state code path. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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