Re: [PATCH v5 0/4] blk-mq: Fix two causes of IO stalls found in reboot testing

[Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>]

On 4/20/20 10:24 AM, Douglas Anderson wrote:
> While doing reboot testing, I found that occasionally my device would
> trigger the hung task detector.  Many tasks were stuck waiting for the
> a blkdev mutex, but at least one task in the system was always sitting
> waiting for IO to complete (and holding the blkdev mutex).  One
> example of a task that was just waiting for its IO to complete on one
> reboot:
> 
>  udevd           D    0  2177    306 0x00400209
>  Call trace:
>   __switch_to+0x15c/0x17c
>   __schedule+0x6e0/0x928
>   schedule+0x8c/0xbc
>   schedule_timeout+0x9c/0xfc
>   io_schedule_timeout+0x24/0x48
>   do_wait_for_common+0xd0/0x160
>   wait_for_completion_io_timeout+0x54/0x74
>   blk_execute_rq+0x9c/0xd8
>   __scsi_execute+0x104/0x198
>   scsi_test_unit_ready+0xa0/0x154
>   sd_check_events+0xb4/0x164
>   disk_check_events+0x58/0x154
>   disk_clear_events+0x74/0x110
>   check_disk_change+0x28/0x6c
>   sd_open+0x5c/0x130
>   __blkdev_get+0x20c/0x3d4
>   blkdev_get+0x74/0x170
>   blkdev_open+0x94/0xa8
>   do_dentry_open+0x268/0x3a0
>   vfs_open+0x34/0x40
>   path_openat+0x39c/0xdf4
>   do_filp_open+0x90/0x10c
>   do_sys_open+0x150/0x3c8
>   ...
> 
> I've reproduced this on two systems: one boots from an internal UFS
> disk and one from eMMC.  Each has a card reader attached via USB with
> an SD card plugged in.  On the USB-attached SD card is a disk with 12
> partitions (a Chrome OS test image), if it matters.  The system
> doesn't do much with the USB disk other than probe it (it's plugged in
> my system to help me recover).
> 
> From digging, I believe that there are two separate but related
> issues.  Both issues relate to the SCSI code saying that there is no
> budget.
> 
> I have done testing with only one or the other of the two patches in
> this series and found that I could still encounter hung tasks if only
> one of the two patches was applied.  This deserves a bit of
> explanation.  To me, it's fairly obvious that the first fix wouldn't
> fix the problems talked about in the second patch.  However, it's less
> obvious why the second patch doesn't fix the problems in
> blk_mq_dispatch_rq_list().  It turns out that it _almost_ does
> (problems become much more rare), but I did manage to get a single
> trace where the "kick" scheduled by the second patch happened really
> quickly.  The scheduled kick then ran and found nothing to do.  This
> happened in parallel to a task running in blk_mq_dispatch_rq_list()
> which hadn't gotten around to splicing the list back into
> hctx->dispatch.  This is why we need both fixes.
> 
> Most of my testing has been atop Chrome OS 5.4's kernel tree which
> currently has v5.4.30 merged in.  The Chrome OS 5.4 tree also has a
> patch by Salman Qazi, namely ("block: Limit number of items taken from
> the I/O scheduler in one go").  Reverting that patch didn't make the
> hung tasks go away, so I kept it in for most of my testing.
> 
> I have also done some testing on mainline Linux (most on what git
> describe calls v5.6-rc7-227-gf3e69428b5e2) even without Salman's
> patch.  I found that I could reproduce the problems there and that
> traces looked about the same as I saw on the downstream branch.  These
> patches were also confirmed to fix the problems on mainline.
> 
> Chrome OS is currently setup to use the BFQ scheduler and I found that
> I couldn't reproduce the problems without BFQ.  As discussed in the
> second patch this is believed to be because BFQ sometimes returns
> "true" from has_work() but then NULL from dispatch_request().
> 
> I'll insert my usual caveat that I'm sending patches to code that I
> know very little about.  If I'm making a total bozo patch here, please
> help me figure out how I should fix the problems I found in a better
> way.
> 
> If you want to see a total ridiculous amount of chatter where I
> stumbled around a whole bunch trying to figure out what was wrong and
> how to fix it, feel free to read <https://crbug.com/1061950>.  I
> promise it will make your eyes glaze over right away if this cover
> letter didn't already do that.  Specifically comment 79 in that bug
> includes a link to my ugly prototype of making BFQ's has_work() more
> exact (I only managed it by actually defining _both_ an exact and
> inexact function to avoid circular locking problems when it was called
> directly from blk_mq_hctx_has_pending()).  Comment 79 also has more
> thoughts about alternatives considered.
> 
> I don't know if these fixes represent a regression of some sort or are
> new.  As per above I could only reproduce with BFQ enabled which makes
> it nearly impossible to go too far back with this.  I haven't listed
> any "Fixes" tags here, but if someone felt it was appropriate to
> backport this to some stable trees that seems like it'd be nice.
> Presumably at least 5.4 stable would make sense.
> 
> Thanks to Salman Qazi, Paolo Valente, and Guenter Roeck who spent a
> bunch of time helping me trawl through some of this code and reviewing
> early versions of this patch.

Applied, thanks.

-- 
Jens Axboe