Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: silence soft lockups from unlock_page

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Tue 21-07-20 08:33:33, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 11:33 PM Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > The lockup is in page_unlock in do_read_fault and I suspect that this is
> > yet another effect of a very long waitqueue chain which has been
> > addresses by 11a19c7b099f ("sched/wait: Introduce wakeup boomark in
> > wake_up_page_bit") previously.
> 
> Hmm.
> 
> I do not believe that you can actually get to the point where you have
> a million waiters and it takes 20+ seconds to wake everybody up.

I was really suprised as well!

> More likely, it's actually *caused* by that commit 11a19c7b099f, and
> what might be happening is that other CPU's are just adding new
> waiters to the list *while* we're waking things up, because somebody
> else already got the page lock again.
> 
> Humor me.. Does something like this work instead? It's
> whitespace-damaged because of just a cut-and-paste, but it's entirely
> untested, and I haven't really thought about any memory ordering
> issues, but I think it's ok.
> 
> The logic is that anybody who called wake_up_page_bit() _must_ have
> cleared that bit before that. So if we ever see it set again (and
> memory ordering doesn't matter), then clearly somebody else got access
> to the page bit (whichever it was), and we should not
> 
>  (a) waste time waking up people who can't get the bit anyway
> 
>  (b) be in a  livelock where other CPU's continually add themselves to
> the wait queue because somebody else got the bit.
> 
> and it's that (b) case that I think happens for you.
> 
> NOTE! Totally UNTESTED patch follows. I think it's good, but maybe
> somebody sees some problem with this approach?

I can ask them to give it a try.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs