While trying to "dd" to the block device for a USB stick, I
encountered a hung task warning (blocked for > 120 seconds). I
managed to come up with an easy way to reproduce this on my system
(where /dev/sdb is the block device for my USB stick) with:
while true; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; done
With my reproduction here are the relevant bits from the hung task
detector:
INFO: task udevd:294 blocked for more than 122 seconds.
...
udevd D 0 294 1 0x00400008
Call trace:
...
mutex_lock_nested+0x40/0x50
__blkdev_get+0x7c/0x3d4
blkdev_get+0x118/0x138
blkdev_open+0x94/0xa8
do_dentry_open+0x268/0x3a0
vfs_open+0x34/0x40
path_openat+0x39c/0xdf4
do_filp_open+0x90/0x10c
do_sys_open+0x150/0x3c8
...
...
Showing all locks held in the system:
...
1 lock held by dd/2798:
#0: ffffff814ac1a3b8 (&bdev->bd_mutex){+.+.}, at: __blkdev_put+0x50/0x204
...
dd D 0 2798 2764 0x00400208
Call trace:
...
schedule+0x8c/0xbc
io_schedule+0x1c/0x40
wait_on_page_bit_common+0x238/0x338
__lock_page+0x5c/0x68
write_cache_pages+0x194/0x500
generic_writepages+0x64/0xa4
blkdev_writepages+0x24/0x30
do_writepages+0x48/0xa8
__filemap_fdatawrite_range+0xac/0xd8
filemap_write_and_wait+0x30/0x84
__blkdev_put+0x88/0x204
blkdev_put+0xc4/0xe4
blkdev_close+0x28/0x38
__fput+0xe0/0x238
____fput+0x1c/0x28
task_work_run+0xb0/0xe4
do_notify_resume+0xfc0/0x14bc
work_pending+0x8/0x14
The problem appears related to the fact that my USB disk is terribly
slow and that I have a lot of RAM in my system to cache things.
Specifically my writes seem to be happening at ~15 MB/s and I've got
~4 GB of RAM in my system that can be used for buffering. To write 4
GB of buffer to disk thus takes ~4000 MB / ~15 MB/s = ~267 seconds.
The 267 second number is a problem because in __blkdev_put() we call
sync_blockdev() while holding the bd_mutex. Any other callers who
want the bd_mutex will be blocked for the whole time.
The problem is made worse because I believe blkdev_put() specifically
tells other tasks (namely udev) to go try to access the device at right
around the same time we're going to hold the mutex for a long time.
Putting some traces around this (after disabling the hung task detector),
I could confirm:
dd: 437.608600: __blkdev_put() right before sync_blockdev() for sdb
udevd: 437.623901: blkdev_open() right before blkdev_get() for sdb
dd: 661.468451: __blkdev_put() right after sync_blockdev() for sdb
udevd: 663.820426: blkdev_open() right after blkdev_get() for sdb
A simple fix for this is to realize that sync_blockdev() works fine if
you're not holding the mutex. Also, it's not the end of the world if
you sync a little early (though it can have performance impacts).
Thus we can make a guess that we're going to need to do the sync and
then do it without holding the mutex. We still do one last sync with
the mutex but it should be much, much faster.
With this, my hung task warnings for my test case are gone.
Signed-off-by: Douglas Anderson <dianders@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
I didn't put a "Fixes" annotation here because, as far as I can tell,
this issue has been here "forever" unless someone knows of something
else that changed that made this possible to hit. This could probably
get picked back to any stable tree that anyone is still maintaining.
fs/block_dev.c | 14 ++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 14 insertions(+)
diff --git a/fs/block_dev.c b/fs/block_dev.c
index 69bf2fb6f7cd..e92c667c4031 100644
--- a/fs/block_dev.c
+++ b/fs/block_dev.c
@@ -1881,6 +1881,20 @@ static void __blkdev_put(struct block_device *bdev, fmode_t mode, int for_part)
struct block_device *victim = NULL;
mutex_lock_nested(&bdev->bd_mutex, for_part);
+ if (bdev->bd_openers == 1) {
+ /*
+ * Sync early if it looks like we're the last one. If someone
+ * else opens the block device between now and the decrement
+ * of bd_openers then we did a sync that we didn't need to,
+ * but that's not the end of the world and we want to avoid
+ * long (could be several minute) syncs while holding the
+ * mutex.
+ */
+ mutex_unlock(&bdev->bd_mutex);
+ sync_blockdev(bdev);
+ mutex_lock_nested(&bdev->bd_mutex, for_part);
+ }
+
if (for_part)
bdev->bd_part_count--;
--
2.25.1.696.g5e7596f4ac-goog
