Re: [RFC][PATCH] CPUSets: Move most calls to rebuild_sched_domains() to the workqueue

["Paul Menage" <menage@google.com>]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Max Krasnyansky <maxk@qualcomm.com> wrote:
>>
>> Does that mean that you can't ever call get_online_cpus() from a
>> workqueue thread?
>
> In general it should be ok (no different from user-space task calling it).

No, I think it is a problem.

When a CPU goes down, the hotplug code holds cpu_hotplug.lock and
calls cleanup_workqueue_thread() which waits for any running work on
that thread to finish.

So if the workqueue thread running on that CPU calls get_online_cpus()
while the hotplug thread is waiting for it, it will deadlock. (It's
not clear to me how lockdep figured this out - I guess it's something
to do with the *_acquire() annotations that tell lockdep to treat the
workqueue structure as a pseudo-lock?)

I guess the fix for that would be to have a non-workqueue thread to
handle the async domain rebuilding, which isn't tied to a particular
cpu the way workqueue threads are.

> But there is still circular dependency because we're calling into
> domain partitioning code.

OK, so the problem is that since cpu_hotplug contains a hand-rolled
rwsem, lockdep is going to spot false deadlocks.

Is there any reason not to replace cpu_hotplug.lock and
cpu_hotplug.refcount with an rw_semaphore, and have the following:

void get_online_cpus(void)
{
        might_sleep();
        if (cpu_hotplug.active_writer == current)
                return;
        down_read(&cpu_hotplug.lock);
}

void put_online_cpus(void)
{
        if (cpu_hotplug.active_writer == current)
                return;
        up_read(&cpu_hotplug.lock);
}

static void cpu_hotplug_begin(void)
{
        down_write(&cpu_hotplug.lock);
        cpu_hotplug.active_writer = current;
}

static void cpu_hotplug_done(void)
{
        cpu_hotplug.active_writer = NULL;
        up_write(&cpu_hotplug.lock);
}

I think that combined with moving the async rebuild_sched_domains to a
separate thread should solve the problem, but I'm wondering why
cpu_hotplug.lock was implemented this way in the first place.

Paul