mainlining shenanigans
206b92353c
Tianyu reported a crash in a CPU hotplug teardown callback when booting a
kernel which has CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU disabled with the 'nosmt' boot
parameter.
It turns out that the SMP=y CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=n case has been broken
forever in case that a bringup callback fails. Unfortunately this issue was
not recognized when the CPU hotplug code was reworked, so the shortcoming
just stayed in place.
When a bringup callback fails, the CPU hotplug code rolls back the
operation and takes the CPU offline.
The 'nosmt' command line argument uses a bringup failure to abort the
bringup of SMT sibling CPUs. This partial bringup is required due to the
MCE misdesign on Intel CPUs.
With CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=y the rollback works perfectly fine, but
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=n lacks essential mechanisms to exercise the low level
teardown of a CPU including the synchronizations in various facilities like
RCU, NOHZ and others.
As a consequence the teardown callbacks which must be executed on the
outgoing CPU within stop machine with interrupts disabled are executed on
the control CPU in interrupt enabled and preemptible context causing the
kernel to crash and burn. The pre state machine code has a different
failure mode which is more subtle and resulting in a less obvious use after
free crash because the control side frees resources which are still in use
by the undead CPU.
But this is not a x86 only problem. Any architecture which supports the
SMP=y HOTPLUG_CPU=n combination suffers from the same issue. It's just less
likely to be triggered because in 99.99999% of the cases all bringup
callbacks succeed.
The easy solution of making HOTPLUG_CPU mandatory for SMP is not working on
all architectures as the following architectures have either no hotplug
support at all or not all subarchitectures support it:
alpha, arc, hexagon, openrisc, riscv, sparc (32bit), mips (partial).
Crashing the kernel in such a situation is not an acceptable state
either.
Implement a minimal rollback variant by limiting the teardown to the point
where all regular teardown callbacks have been invoked and leave the CPU in
the 'dead' idle state. This has the following consequences:
- the CPU is brought down to the point where the stop_machine takedown
would happen.
- the CPU stays there forever and is idle
- The CPU is cleared in the CPU active mask, but not in the CPU online
mask which is a legit state.
- Interrupts are not forced away from the CPU
- All facilities which only look at online mask would still see it, but
that is the case during normal hotplug/unplug operations as well. It's
just a (way) longer time frame.
This will expose issues, which haven't been exposed before or only seldom,
because now the normally transient state of being non active but online is
a permanent state. In testing this exposed already an issue vs. work queues
where the vmstat code schedules work on the almost dead CPU which ends up
in an unbound workqueue and triggers 'preemtible context' warnings. This is
not a problem of this change, it merily exposes an already existing issue.
Still this is better than crashing fully without a chance to debug it.
This is mainly thought as workaround for those architectures which do not
support HOTPLUG_CPU. All others should enforce HOTPLUG_CPU for SMP.
Fixes:
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|---|---|---|
| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| LICENSES | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.