Re: WARNING at net/mac80211/sta_info.c:1057 (__sta_info_destroy_part2())

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

On 09/11/2019 05:04 AM, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-09-11 at 12:58 +0100, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>
>> And I didn't think about it or double-check, because the errors that
>> then followed later _looked_ like that TX power failing that I thought
>> hadn't happened.
>
> Yeah, it could be something already got stuck there, hard to say.
>
>>> Since we see that something actually did an rfkill operation. Did you
>>> push a button there?
>>
>> No, I tried to turn off and turn on Wifi manually (no button, just the
>> settings panel).
>
> That does usually also cause rfkill, so that explains how we got down
> this particular code path.
>
>> I didn't notice the WARN_ON(), I just noticed that there was no
>> networking, and "turn it off and on again" is obviously the first
>> thing to try ;)
>
> :-)
>
>> Sep 11 10:27:13 xps13 kernel: WARNING: CPU: 4 PID: 1246 at
>> net/mac80211/sta_info.c:1057 __sta_info_destroy_part2+0x147/0x150
>> [mac80211]
>>
>> but if you want full logs I can send them in private to you.
>
> No, it's fine, though maybe Kalle does - he was stepping out for a while
> but said he'd look later.
>
> This is the interesting time - 10:27:13 we get one of the first
> failures. Really the first one was this:
>
>> Sep 11 10:27:07 xps13 kernel: ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: wmi command 16387 timeout, restarting hardware
>
>
>> I do suspect it's atheros and suspend/resume or something. The
>> wireless clearly worked for a while after the resume, but then at some
>> point it stopped.
>
> I'm not really sure it's related to suspend/resume at all, the firmware
> seems to just have gotten stuck, and the device and firmware most likely
> got reset over the suspend/resume anyway.
>
>>> The only explanation I therefore have is that something is just taking
>>> *forever* in that code path, hence my question about timing information
>>> on the logs.
>>
>> Yeah, maybe it would time out everything eventually. But not for a
>> long time. It hadn't cleared up by
>>
>>   Sep 11 10:36:21 xps13 gnome-session-f[6837]: gnome-session-failed:
>> Fatal IO error 0 (Success) on X server :0.
>
> Ok, that's way longer than I would have guessed even! That's over 9
> minutes, that'd be close to 200 commands having to be issued and timing
> out ...
>
> I don't know. What I wrote before is basically all I can say, I think
> the driver gets stuck somewhere waiting for the device "forever", and
> the stack just doesn't get to release the lock, causing all the follow-
> up problems.

It looks to me like the ath10k firmware is not responding to commands and/or
is out of its WMI tx credits.  The code often takes a lock and then blocks for up to 3
or so seconds waiting for a response from the firmware, and the mac80211 calling
code is often already holding rtnl.  Pretty much every mac80211 call will cause a
WMI message and thus potentially hit this timeout.

This can easily cause rtnl to be held for 3 seconds, but after that, I believe
upstream ath10k will now time out and kill the firmware and restart.  (I run
a significantly modified ath10k driver, and that is how mine works, at least.)

In this case, it looks like restarting the firmware/NIC failed, and I guess
that must get it in a state where it is still blocking and trying to talk
to the firmware?  Or maybe deadlock down inside ath10k driver.

For what it's worth, we see that WARN_ON often when ath10k firmware crashes, but it
seems to not be a big deal and the system normally recovers fine.

Out of curiosity, I'm interested to know what ath10k NIC chipset this is from.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com