Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Petr Vandrovec]

On 26 Jul 02 at 12:00, Petr Vandrovec wrote:

> P.S.: I did not saw IDE 105. Does it exist?

Ah, found that while reading rest of LKLM. Why so secret name
"Re: Linux 2.5.28" ?
                                                Petr
                                                

Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Marcin Dalecki]

Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> On 26 Jul 02 at 12:00, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> 
> 
>>P.S.: I did not saw IDE 105. Does it exist?
> 
> 
> Ah, found that while reading rest of LKLM. Why so secret name
> "Re: Linux 2.5.28" ?

Just becouse I abuse my reply button as address book :-).
Not really intentionall.

Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Petr Vandrovec]

On 26 Jul 02 at 12:30, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
> Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> 
> > Well, no. Both of these loop have completely different terminating conditions.
> > You exit when IDE hardware is busy, while SCSI exits if hardware is busy,
> > or when there is nothing to do. Fundamental difference.
> 
> Shit - you are right. We look until the next request sets IDE_BUSY as a 
> side effect.... I just wanted to close the window between clear we clear
> IDE_BUSY in ata_irq_handler just before recalling do_request to set it 
> immediately on again.
> Should be both of course.

Most of IDE code access IDE_BUSY flag when queue lock is held. So just 
move it inside lock everywhere... As side benefit you do not have to use 
atomic test_and_set then, you can use faster non-atomic (without lock prefix) 
equivalents.

In fact it looks to me like that only tcq's udma_tcq_start accesses
IDE_BUSY without holding queue lock, and it is only read access to print
some BUG()-like message.
                                                        Petr Vandrovec
                                                        vandrove@vc.cvut.cz
                                                                       

Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Marcin Dalecki]

Petr Vandrovec wrote:

> Well, no. Both of these loop have completely different terminating conditions.
> You exit when IDE hardware is busy, while SCSI exits if hardware is busy,
> or when there is nothing to do. Fundamental difference.

Shit - you are right. We look until the next request sets IDE_BUSY as a 
side effect.... I just wanted to close the window between clear we clear
IDE_BUSY in ata_irq_handler just before recalling do_request to set it 
immediately on again.
Should be both of course.

>>Same allies to blk_stop_queue().
> 
> 
> So your request_fn is invoked for each of queues which had pending
> requests. Upper layer cannot expect that you are using two queues,
> but hardware really wants to use only one. Shared queue_lock is there
> for hardware which can start one request at a time (one set of
> registers...), but can have requests to the different devices
> in progress.

Yes theoretically yes. The problem is only that queue_lock doesn't as
advertized becouse the request_fn are *releasing* the spin lock at a 
point where the QUEUE_FLAG_STOP doesn't have any usefull value.


> P.S.: I did not saw IDE 105. Does it exist?

I think I did send it under a wrong topic. Please look for Re:
Linux-2.5.28.

Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Petr Vandrovec]

On 26 Jul 02 at 4:09, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
> 
> > while (!test_and_set_bit(IDE_BUSY, ch->active)) {
> >   do_request(ch)
> > }
> > 
> > looks very suspicious to me - it will loop here until the end of world,
> > as there is nothing in queue, so do_request() will always exit
> > with IDE_BUSY cleared.
> 
> Yes it should and IDE_BUSY is a real botch becouse this is relying on
> IRQ handlers manipulating it during REQ finish time by calling
> back to do_request(). (Other drivers do q->request_fn instead, which is
> not nice as well.)
> 
> > Next question is: with this stack trace, where you obtained ch->lock,
> > so that do_request() can do call to spin_unlock(ch->lock) ? It looks
> > to me like that I should get 'unlocking unlocked spinlock' with
> > appropriate debug.
> > 
> > What (probably) happened is that hardware finished request before 
> > spin_lock_irq(ch->lock) (at line 749) was executed, we quit with
> > IDE_BUSY cleared, and it was last thing we did... Maybe I should
> > go back to IDE-98?
> 
> This wan't help much, since the problem is a bit more fundamental
> as I think and the code should be equivalent. BTW. You will find
> something similar in scsi_lib.c more precisely scsi_request_fn(). The
> ->host_busy is what they use for the same purpose IDE_BUSY is serving in
> IDE code.

I'll left other things for Jens, but... code is NOT equivalent.
Old code, before you moved IDE_BUSY loop one function above, used
break; to exit loop - note break, not continue. So when it found
queue empty, it exited do_request, and everything was fine. But with
your change it will loop here forever. Forever! You see?

I did not find anything simillar in scsi_lib - its scsi_request_fn
terminates when queue is plugged, or when queue is empty, and in
couple of other situations. Simple moving test_and_set_bit() loop
back into do_request, and replace returns with breaks will fix it. I think.
 
> Keep this in mind please! And please look a bit closer at the code
> if something below isn't entierly clear.  So now follows the longer
> explanation:
> 
> 2. The main problem with 1. is that requests get feed through a host 
> controller to the actual target device. And since one host
> controller can drive multiple devices on a single bus (channel in IDE)
> this makes up a requirement for synchronization primitives between
> multiple queues here. It's a natural thing and we should account for it.
> (IDE_BUSY loop in ide.c and while (1==1) loop in scsi_lib.c).

Well, no. Both of these loop have completely different terminating conditions.
You exit when IDE hardware is busy, while SCSI exits if hardware is busy,
or when there is nothing to do. Fundamental difference.
 
> 5. Further the whole implementation of the usage of this shared lock
> is *buggy* in ll_rw_blk.c in first place. It's used in conjecture with
> the QUEUE_FLAG_STOPPED flag. *But* and this is a BIG BUT! This flag 
> isn't shared in the case that blk_queue_assign_lock() was applied to two
> different queues. So this is what is causing the preemption
> problems which you see on operation between master and slave
> for example on a single IDE channel. Look here if you don't
> belive me:

Only problem is that I have only one harddisk in this machine, and
when fsck is running, I'm 100% sure that it even did not try to access
other /dev/hd* devices... 

> queue_lock is the pointer optionally supplied by
> blk_queue_assign_lock(). You see that the flags are not shared.
> But here you see that they are needed:
> 
> void blk_start_queue(request_queue_t *q)
> {
>     if (test_and_clear_bit(QUEUE_FLAG_STOPPED, &q->queue_flags)) {
>         unsigned long flags;
> 
>         spin_lock_irqsave(q->queue_lock, flags);
>         if (!elv_queue_empty(q))
>             q->request_fn(q);
>         spin_unlock_irqrestore(q->queue_lock, flags);
>     }
> }
> 
> Same allies to blk_stop_queue().

So your request_fn is invoked for each of queues which had pending
requests. Upper layer cannot expect that you are using two queues,
but hardware really wants to use only one. Shared queue_lock is there
for hardware which can start one request at a time (one set of
registers...), but can have requests to the different devices
in progress.
 
> First and foremost: blk_queue_assign_lock doesn't make *any* sense.
> It's broken by concept. Since:
> 
> 1. The discussion above shows that it doesn't do the job it
> is supposed to do.

Really? You can create one queue for each of SCSI devices you have,
and SCSI host adapter puts same lock to all queues. Each queue can
be stopped at will, and together their accesses to the host are serialized...
                                                 Petr Vandrovec
                                                 vandrove@vc.cvut.cz
                                                 
P.S.: I did not saw IDE 105. Does it exist?
                                                        

Re: IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Marcin Dalecki]

Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> Martin,
>    can you explain what local_irq_disable() in do_request in
> drivers/ide/ide.c should guard against? There is dozen (all unless I 
> missed something) of paths which do not local_irq_enable(), and neither 
> does the caller...

You are wellcome.

local_irq_disale() in do_request was supposed to prevent preemption
from unexpected IRQs. It's indeed not good for anything right now.
It was there before I disabled it at about 2.5.15 time to see what
happens and I reenabled it during tickeling with the code recently to
see the effects of the whole IRQ handling changes or supposedly to make
it safer, since I wasn't quite qure about the do_request() consumers
ata_irq_handler and ide_timer_expiry. It's gone again
now in my tree. But this time for ever.

> And what you meant with (endless) loop in ide_do_request?

You mean do_ide_request(). Well this is a hard and long story, s
please let me elaborate later about it. (See below.)

> And where do_request() callers obtain channel lock so that do_request()
> can release and reacquire it?

It's only called from within request_fn contents and the channel lock
is in reality the request queue lock taken already in the
generic BIO layer, where it's supposed to provied protection from
reentrancy withhin request queues. (Note: BIO mean block io for me.)

> My problem is that fsck reliable dies between 79.6 and 81% of its
> run - on UP machine with SMP kernel:

Yeep I know. And the reason this happens is that right now I'm in the
process of making the driver really per device request queue aware.
See below plese.

> while (!test_and_set_bit(IDE_BUSY, ch->active)) {
>   do_request(ch)
> }
> 
> looks very suspicious to me - it will loop here until the end of world,
> as there is nothing in queue, so do_request() will always exit
> with IDE_BUSY cleared.

Yes it should and IDE_BUSY is a real botch becouse this is relying on
IRQ handlers manipulating it during REQ finish time by calling
back to do_request(). (Other drivers do q->request_fn instead, which is
not nice as well.)

> Next question is: with this stack trace, where you obtained ch->lock,
> so that do_request() can do call to spin_unlock(ch->lock) ? It looks
> to me like that I should get 'unlocking unlocked spinlock' with
> appropriate debug.
> 
> What (probably) happened is that hardware finished request before 
> spin_lock_irq(ch->lock) (at line 749) was executed, we quit with
> IDE_BUSY cleared, and it was last thing we did... Maybe I should
> go back to IDE-98?

This wan't help much, since the problem is a bit more fundamental
as I think and the code should be equivalent. BTW. You will find
something similar in scsi_lib.c more precisely scsi_request_fn(). The
->host_busy is what they use for the same purpose IDE_BUSY is serving in
IDE code.

Keep this in mind please! And please look a bit closer at the code
if something below isn't entierly clear.  So now follows the longer
explanation:

1. Linux started to use per device request queues recently. This
change is good and all well, since it is allowing the software device
called elevator to do a lot of optimializations on the request
queue before they get send down to the actual device

2. The main problem with 1. is that requests get feed through a host 
controller to the actual target device. And since one host
controller can drive multiple devices on a single bus (channel in IDE)
this makes up a requirement for synchronization primitives between
multiple queues here. It's a natural thing and we should account for it.
(IDE_BUSY loop in ide.c and while (1==1) loop in scsi_lib.c).

3. The generic request queue handling found in ll_rw_blk.c provides
for this purpose a way of assigning an explicit lock to a request
queue attached to a device by using the blk_queue_assign_lock()
function. This is supposed to synchronize two queues on the
level of ll_rw_block.c if you provide the same lock to multiple queues.

4. Well unfortunately 3. is futile. It's buggy. We can
supply the same lock to two queues but this lock is basically only 
protecting the queues data structures not
the flow of requests. Both SCSI and ATA subsystem release this
lock in the strategy functions (queue->request_fn = do_ide_request = 
do_request = scsi_request_fn) for  good reasons: Trying to minimize the 
time the kernel can't be preempted and the need to release IRQ's
after request submission and before looping for the next pendig request 
on the queue. Keep in ming the  request_fn method is supposed to
work through a whole chain of pending requests!

And then both ATA and SCSI need to insert artificial request in to the
request queue. This is in esp. necessary to maintain proper execution
context out from the final IRQ signaling request processing finishment
as well as calling the end_request method.

(I have already abstracted it out from both SCSI and ATA in my code
tree.)

5. Further the whole implementation of the usage of this shared lock
is *buggy* in ll_rw_blk.c in first place. It's used in conjecture with
the QUEUE_FLAG_STOPPED flag. *But* and this is a BIG BUT! This flag 
isn't shared in the case that blk_queue_assign_lock() was applied to two
different queues. So this is what is causing the preemption
problems which you see on operation between master and slave
for example on a single IDE channel. Look here if you don't
belive me:

	/*
	 * various queue flags, see QUEUE_* below
	 */
	unsigned long		queue_flags;

	/*
	 * protects queue structures from reentrancy
	 */
	spinlock_t		*queue_lock;

	/*

queue_lock is the pointer optionally supplied by
blk_queue_assign_lock(). You see that the flags are not shared.
But here you see that they are needed:

void blk_start_queue(request_queue_t *q)
{
	if (test_and_clear_bit(QUEUE_FLAG_STOPPED, &q->queue_flags)) {
		unsigned long flags;

		spin_lock_irqsave(q->queue_lock, flags);
		if (!elv_queue_empty(q))
			q->request_fn(q);
		spin_unlock_irqrestore(q->queue_lock, flags);
	}
}

Same allies to blk_stop_queue().

6. I have already explained the even in the case of not shared
queues the QUEUE_FLAG_STOPPED isn't maintained in an consistant
manner. Look above for eample blk_start_queue is obviously racy.

Still wondering why you expirence SMP problems after I switched to
proper per device queues not running through a single big
ide_lock? I think its worth it to try to accomlish this. But of
course right now it's causing quite a lot of pain.

What I wan't to do about it is roughly the following:

First and foremost: blk_queue_assign_lock doesn't make *any* sense.
It's broken by concept. Since:

1. The discussion above shows that it doesn't do the job it
is supposed to do.

2. It's sidestepping the allockation of locks on the generic
level. Why should we callocate a third lock when we have
already two default queue locks waiting to be used?

It would make much more sense to have the following function:

blk_queue_set_synch(queue_new, queue_to_synchronize_with);

returning a pointer to the lock shared after such a flagging
during queue setup time in the device registration process.

Of course the usage of queue_flags has to be fixed.

I will do this by allowing to chaing queues together in
request_queue_t struct to flag for the synchronization.
In case of chained qeues it will be only the head queue where
the queue_flags field will matter.
This will be better then the *queue_lock pointer and allocation games
currently found there. It will make cheking before q->request_fn call 
times a bit more complicated. But that is for sure fine, since the chain
isn't the determining comlexity factor here. And this will allow
for a lot of simplification on behalf of the drivers using it.

I didn't even start to explain the in esp. stacked device
drivers are basically all reimplementing a whole request queueing
interface on they own just becouse they can synch properly
between the disks below them...

I have already abstracted out the scsi_insert_request_cmd
stuff out from scsi_lib.c. I use the same in ATA now.

I will use blk_stop_queue() and blk_start_queue() primitives
for the purpose of request order synchroniation then instead
of the ->host_busy, IDE_BUSY and explicite q->reuqest_fn() call
games played now. Its' f*cking hard to stall request queuest on
the bottom part -> every single driver, since there you have do
be basically in IRQ context when doing this -> which means
races and no possiblity to give up CPU time, since you can't
reschedule.

I'm there right now? Certainly not. In esp. since the preemption of
the kernel got far more aggressive and one has to be much more
carefull right now even in UP case. I'm working on it? Yes.
Can patches be expected soon? Yes but in chunks, since right now I'm 
still not at the finish line with it.

Finally I hope that I have explained myself enough here.

IDE lockups with 2.5.28...

[Petr Vandrovec]

Martin,
   can you explain what local_irq_disable() in do_request in
drivers/ide/ide.c should guard against? There is dozen (all unless I 
missed something) of paths which do not local_irq_enable(), and neither 
does the caller...

And what you meant with (endless) loop in ide_do_request?

And where do_request() callers obtain channel lock so that do_request()
can release and reacquire it?

My problem is that fsck reliable dies between 79.6 and 81% of its
run - on UP machine with SMP kernel:

NMI detected lockup on CPU0 ...

Stack trace: do_request + 315/924
             do_ide_request
             generic_unplug_device
             blk_run_queues
             do_page_cache_readahead
             page_cache_readahead
             do_generic_file_read
             generic_file_read
             file_read_actor
             vfs_read
             sys_read

do_request+315 is clear_bit(IDE_BUSY, channel->active) at line 606.

The do_ide_request()'s loop

while (!test_and_set_bit(IDE_BUSY, ch->active)) {
  do_request(ch)
}

looks very suspicious to me - it will loop here until the end of world,
as there is nothing in queue, so do_request() will always exit
with IDE_BUSY cleared.

Next question is: with this stack trace, where you obtained ch->lock,
so that do_request() can do call to spin_unlock(ch->lock) ? It looks
to me like that I should get 'unlocking unlocked spinlock' with
appropriate debug.

What (probably) happened is that hardware finished request before 
spin_lock_irq(ch->lock) (at line 749) was executed, we quit with
IDE_BUSY cleared, and it was last thing we did... Maybe I should
go back to IDE-98?
                                            Thanks,
                                                Petr Vandrovec
                                                vandrove@vc.cvut.cz