Re: [PATCH v1 0/3] generalize panic_print's dump function to be used by other kernel parts

[Feng Tang <feng.tang@linux.alibaba.com>]

On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 03:27:33PM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
> On Mon 2025-05-12 16:23:30, Lance Yang wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On 2025/5/12 11:14, Feng Tang wrote:
> > > Hi Andrew,
> > > 
> > > Thanks for the review!
> > > 
> > > On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 06:46:17PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > On Sun, 11 May 2025 16:52:51 +0800 Feng Tang <feng.tang@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > When working on kernel stability issues, panic, task-hung and
> > > > > software/hardware lockup are frequently met. And to debug them, user
> > > > > may need lots of system information at that time, like task call stacks,
> > > > > lock info, memory info etc.
> > > > > 
> > > > > panic case already has panic_print_sys_info() for this purpose, and has
> > > > > a 'panic_print' bitmask to control what kinds of information is needed,
> > > > > which is also helpful to debug other task-hung and lockup cases.
> > > > > 
> > > > > So this patchset extract the function out, and make it usable for other
> > > > > cases which also need system info for debugging.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Locally these have been used in our bug chasing for stablility issues
> > > > > and was helpful.
> > > > 
> > > > Truth.  Our responses to panics, oopses, WARNs, BUGs, OOMs etc seem
> > > > quite poorly organized.  Some effort to clean up (and document!) all of
> > > > this sounds good.
> > > > 
> > > > My vote is to permit the display of every scrap of information we can
> > > > think of in all situations.  And then to permit users to select which of
> > > > that information is to be displayed under each situation.
> > 
> > Completely agreed. The tricky part is making a global knob that works for
> > all situations without breaking userspace, but it's a better system-wide
> > approach ;)
> > 
> > > 
> > > Good point! Maybe one future todo is to add a gloabl system info dump
> > > function with ONE global knob for selecting different kinds of information,
> > > which could be embedded into some cases you mentioned above.
> > 
> > IMHO, for features with their own knobs, we need:
> > a) The global knob (if enabled) turns on all related feature-level knobs,
> > b) while still allowing users to manually override individual knobs.
> > 
> > Something like:
> > 
> > If SYS_PRINT_ALL_CPU_BT (global knob) is on, it enables
> > hung_task_all_cpu_backtrace
> > for hung-task situation automatically. But users can still disable it via
> > hung_task_all_cpu_backtrace.
> 
> I am all for unifying the options for printing debug information
> in various emergency situations. I am just not sure whether we really
> want to do the same in all situations.

Yes, valid concern.

> Some lockup detectors tries to be more clever, for example:
> 
>   + RCU stall detector prints backtraces only from CPUs which are
>     involved in the stall, see print_other_cpu_stall().
> 
>   + Workqueues watchdog shows backtraces from tasks which are
>     preventing forward progress, see show_cpu_pool_hog().
> 
> And stalls are about scheduling (disabled preemption, disabled IRQ,
> deadlocks, too long uninterruptible sleep). OOM is about memory
> usage. Oops is about an invalid memory access. WARNs() are
> completely random stuff.

Agreed. I noticed RCU has special handling and I skipped "RCU stall"
case in this patchset on purpose :)

> Also I am afraid of printing too much information when the system
> is supposed to continue running. It would make sense to print it in
> nbcon_cpu_emergency_enter()/exit() context which disables
> preemption. And it might cause softlockups on its own.

Yes. And for the global knob, my thought is it's 0 (disabled) by
default, which equals doing nothing. And its user should be
experienced developers who knows precisely what information they
need, and set it runtime or by kernel command line. 

For 'panic_print' which we used frequently in bug chasing, we still
let it be 0 even in our debug version kernel, and only enable it
in debugging.

As for the patch set, I tried to not change existing behavior, and
just added option for user to get more info when needed.

> Finally, I wonder whether ftrace_dump() might cause a livelock when ftrace
> is adding new messages in parallel.

IIUC,  ftrace_dump_one() will turn off the tracing during dump, and
should be safe.

> The situation is much easier during panic() because the system is
> going to die() anyway, non-panic CPUs are stopped, ...

Yes.

> That said, I could understand that people might want to see as much
> information as possible when the console is fast and the range of
> possible problems is big.
 
I agree with you that more is not always better, it should be based
on real needs, case by case.

> Anyway, I have added few more people into Cc who are interested into
> the various watchdogs.
> 
> And there is parallel initiative which tries to unify the loglevel or
> somehow make the filtering easier, see
> https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250424070436.2380215-1-senozhatsky@chromium.org

Thanks for involving more people and sharing the link.

Thanks,
Feng

> Best Regards,
> Petr