On 07/28/2016 10:42 PM, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
In case a submited request gets stuck for some reason, the block layer can prevent the request starvation by starting the scheduled timeout work. If this stuck request occurs at the same time another thread has started a queue freeze, the blk_mq_timeout_work will not be able to acquire the queue reference and will return silently, thus not issuing the timeout. But since the request is already holding a q_usage_counter reference and is unable to complete, it will never release its reference, preventing the queue from completing the freeze started by first thread. This puts the request_queue in a hung state, forever waiting for the freeze completion. This was observed while running IO to a NVMe device at the same time we toggled the CPU hotplug code. Eventually, once a request got stuck requiring a timeout during a queue freeze, we saw the CPU Hotplug notification code get stuck inside blk_mq_freeze_queue_wait, as shown in the trace below. [c000000deaf13690] [c000000deaf13738] 0xc000000deaf13738 (unreliable) [c000000deaf13860] [c000000000015ce8] __switch_to+0x1f8/0x350 [c000000deaf138b0] [c000000000ade0e4] __schedule+0x314/0x990 [c000000deaf13940] [c000000000ade7a8] schedule+0x48/0xc0 [c000000deaf13970] [c0000000005492a4] blk_mq_freeze_queue_wait+0x74/0x110 [c000000deaf139e0] [c00000000054b6a8] blk_mq_queue_reinit_notify+0x1a8/0x2e0 [c000000deaf13a40] [c0000000000e7878] notifier_call_chain+0x98/0x100 [c000000deaf13a90] [c0000000000b8e08] cpu_notify_nofail+0x48/0xa0 [c000000deaf13ac0] [c0000000000b92f0] _cpu_down+0x2a0/0x400 [c000000deaf13b90] [c0000000000b94a8] cpu_down+0x58/0xa0 [c000000deaf13bc0] [c0000000006d5dcc] cpu_subsys_offline+0x2c/0x50 [c000000deaf13bf0] [c0000000006cd244] device_offline+0x104/0x140 [c000000deaf13c30] [c0000000006cd40c] online_store+0x6c/0xc0 [c000000deaf13c80] [c0000000006c8c78] dev_attr_store+0x68/0xa0 [c000000deaf13cc0] [c0000000003974d0] sysfs_kf_write+0x80/0xb0 [c000000deaf13d00] [c0000000003963e8] kernfs_fop_write+0x188/0x200 [c000000deaf13d50] [c0000000002e0f6c] __vfs_write+0x6c/0xe0 [c000000deaf13d90] [c0000000002e1ca0] vfs_write+0xc0/0x230 [c000000deaf13de0] [c0000000002e2cdc] SyS_write+0x6c/0x110 [c000000deaf13e30] [c000000000009204] system_call+0x38/0xb4 The fix is to allow the timeout work to execute in the window between dropping the initial refcount reference and the release of the last reference, which actually marks the freeze completion. This can be achieved with percpu_refcount_tryget, which does not require the counter to be alive. This way the timeout work can do it's job and terminate a stuck request even during a freeze, returning its reference and avoiding the deadlock. Allowing the timeout to run is just a part of the fix, since for some devices, we might get stuck again inside the device driver's timeout handler, should it attempt to allocate a new request in that path - which is a quite common action for Abort commands, which need to be sent after a timeout. In NVMe, for instance, we call blk_mq_alloc_request from inside the timeout handler, which will fail during a freeze, since it also tries to acquire a queue reference. I considered a similar change to blk_mq_alloc_request as a generic solution for further device driver hangs, but we can't do that, since it would allow new requests to disturb the freeze process. I thought about creating a new function in the block layer to support unfreezable requests for these occasions, but after working on it for a while, I feel like this should be handled in a per-driver basis. I'm now experimenting with changes to the NVMe timeout path, but I'm open to suggestions of ways to make this generic.
I can see that is an issue. Did you consider the case where blk_mq_timeout_work() is entered, but we don't have any requests allocated that currently hold a reference? This could happen if completion races with a timeout.
In any case, this warrants a big comment explaining why it's open coded. Or, better yet, have an internal __blk_queue_enter() or something that at least shows it's related, and with a comment on why it's different and where it's allowed to be used.
-- Jens Axboe -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-block" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
