Commit 5cbf2fff authored Nov 05, 2019 by Kevin Hao Committed by Linus Torvalds Nov 06, 2019

dump_stack: avoid the livelock of the dump_lock

In the current code, we use the atomic_cmpxchg() to serialize the output
of the dump_stack(), but this implementation suffers the thundering herd
problem.  We have observed such kind of livelock on a Marvell cn96xx
board(24 cpus) when heavily using the dump_stack() in a kprobe handler.
Actually we can let the competitors to wait for the releasing of the
lock before jumping to atomic_cmpxchg().  This will definitely mitigate
the thundering herd problem.  Thanks Linus for the suggestion.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191030031637.6025-1-haokexin@gmail.com


Fixes: b58d9774 ("dump_stack: serialize the output from dump_stack()")
Signed-off-by: Kevin Hao <haokexin@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent a3163130

lib/dump_stack.c

+6 −1

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -106,7 +106,12 @@ retry:
		was_locked = 1;
		} else {
		local_irq_restore(flags);
		cpu_relax();
		/*
		* Wait for the lock to release before jumping to
		* atomic_cmpxchg() in order to mitigate the thundering herd
		* problem.
		*/
		do { cpu_relax(); } while (atomic_read(&dump_lock) != -1);
		goto retry;
		}

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