Re: [PATCH] kfence: Avoid stalling work queue task without allocations

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Mon, 23 Nov 2020 11:28:12 -0500
Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:

> I noticed:
> 
> 
> [  237.650900] enabling event benchmark_event
> 
> In both traces. Could you disable CONFIG_TRACEPOINT_BENCHMARK and see if
> the issue goes away. That event kicks off a thread that spins in a tight
> loop for some time and could possibly cause some issues.
> 
> It still shouldn't break things, we can narrow it down if it is the culprit.

And it probably is the issue because that thread will never sleep! It runs
a loop of:


static int benchmark_event_kthread(void *arg)
{
	/* sleep a bit to make sure the tracepoint gets activated */
	msleep(100);

	while (!kthread_should_stop()) {

		trace_do_benchmark();

		/*
		 * We don't go to sleep, but let others run as well.
		 * This is basically a "yield()" to let any task that
		 * wants to run, schedule in, but if the CPU is idle,
		 * we'll keep burning cycles.
		 *
		 * Note the tasks_rcu_qs() version of cond_resched() will
		 * notify synchronize_rcu_tasks() that this thread has
		 * passed a quiescent state for rcu_tasks. Otherwise
		 * this thread will never voluntarily schedule which would
		 * block synchronize_rcu_tasks() indefinitely.
		 */
		cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs();
	}

	return 0;
}


Did something change, where that "cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs()" doesn't let
things progress on ARM64?

I noticed that you have PREEMPT enabled so this will only be preempted when
its schedule time runs out and something else wants to run. How would that
affect other threads?

-- Steve