Re: BUG in 2.6.20-rt8

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 07:27:47 +0100

> 
> * Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> > I got the following running stock 2.6.20-rt8 on an 4-CPU 1.8GHz 
> > Opteron box.  The machine continued to run a few rounds of kernbench 
> > and LTP. Looks a bit scary -- a tasklet was "stolen" from 
> > __tasklet_action().
> > 
> > Thoughts?  In the meantime, kicking it off again to see if it repeats.
> 
> > BUG: at kernel/softirq.c:559 __tasklet_action()
> 
> this seems to happen very sporadically. Seems to happen more likely on 
> hyperthreading CPUs. It is very likely caused by the 
> redesign-tasklet-locking-to-be-sane patch below - which is a quick hack 
> of mine from early -rt days. Can you see any obvious bug in it? The 
> cmpxchg logic is certainly a bit ... tricky, locking-wise.

Ingo, please don't use cmpxchg() in generic code, we support several
processors that simply cannot do it.

Instead of saying "it's just something special in -rt for now", take
it out now so that what you do eventually push upstream does get
tested.

Thanks.