Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] sched/psi: Fix PSI accounting with proxy execution

[K Prateek Nayak <kprateek.nayak@amd.com>]

Hello John,

On 11/18/2025 6:15 AM, John Stultz wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 10:56 AM K Prateek Nayak <kprateek.nayak@amd.com> wrote:
>>
>> When booting into a kernel with CONFIG_SCHED_PROXY_EXEC and CONFIG_PSI,
>> a inconsistent task state warning was noticed soon after the boot
>> similar to:
>>
>>     psi: inconsistent task state! task=... cpu=... psi_flags=4 clear=0 set=4
>>
>> On analysis, the following sequence of event was found to be the cause
>> of the splat:
>>
>> o Blocked task is retained on the runqueue.
>> o psi_sched_switch() sees task_on_rq_queued() and retains the runnable
>>   signals for the task.
>> o Tasks blocks later via proxy_deactivate() but psi_dequeue() doesn't
>>   adjust the PSI flags since DEQUEUE_SLEEP is set expecting
>>   psi_sched_switch() to fix the signals.
>> o The blocked task is woken up with the PSI state still reflecting that
>>   the task is runnable (TSK_RUNNING) leading to the splat.
> 
> Hey, K Prateek!
>   Thanks for chasing this down and sending this series out!
> 
> I'm still getting my head around the description above (its been
> awhile since I last looked at the PSI code), but early on I often hit
> PSI splats, and I thought I had addressed it with the patch here:
>   https://github.com/johnstultz-work/linux-dev/commit/f60923a6176b3778a8fc9b9b0bbe4953153ce565

Oooo! Let me go test that.

> 
> And with that I've not run across any warnings since.
> 
> Now, I hadn't tripped over the issue recently with the subset of the
> full series I've been pushing upstream, and as I most easily ran into
> it with the sleeping owner enqueuing feature I was holding the fix
> back for those changes. But I realize unfortunately CONFIG_PSI at some
> point got disabled in my test defconfig, so I've not had the
> opportunity to trip it, and sure enough I can trivially see it booting
> with the current upstream code.

I hit this on tip:sched/core when looking at the recent sched_yield()
changes. Maybe the "blocked_on" serialization with the proxy migration
will make this all go away :)

> 
> Applying that fix does seem to avoid the warnings in my trivial
> testing, but again I've not dug through the logic in awhile, so you
> may have a better sense of the inadequacies of that fix.
> 
> If it looks reasonable to you, I'll rework the commit message so it
> isn't so focused on the sleeping-owner-enquing case and submit it.

That would be great! And it seems to be a lot more simpler than the
the stuff I'm trying to do. I'll give it a spin and get back to you.
Thank you again for pointing to the fix.

> 
> I'll have to spend some time here looking more at your proposed
> solution. On the initial glance, I do fret a little with the
> task->sched_proxy bit overlapping a bit in meaning with the
> task->blocked_on value.

Ack! I'm pretty sure with the blocked_on locking we'll not have these
"interesting" situations but I posted the RFC out just in case we
needed something in the interim but turns out its a solved problem :)

On last thing, it'll be good to get some clarification on how to treat
the blocked tasks retained on the runqueue for PSI - quick look at your
fix suggests we still consider them runnable (TSK_RUNNING) from PSI
standpoint - is this ideal or should PSI consider these tasks blocked?

-- 
Thanks and Regards,
Prateek