On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 10:59 +0800, Tang Chen wrote: > > If a cpu is offline, its nid will be set to -1, and cpu_to_node(cpu) will > > return -1. As a result, cpumask_of_node(nid) will return NULL. In this case, > > find_next_bit() in for_each_cpu will get a NULL pointer and cause panic. > > Hurm,. this is new, right? Who is changing all these semantics without > auditing the tree and informing all affected people? > I've nacked the patch that did it because I think it should be done from the generic cpu hotplug code only at the CPU_DEAD level with a per-arch callback to fixup whatever cpu-to-node mappings they maintain since processes can reenter the scheduler at CPU_DYING. The whole issue seems to be because alloc_{fair,rt}_sched_group() does an iteration over all possible cpus (not all online cpus) and does kzalloc_node() which references a now-offlined node. Changing it to -1 makes the slab code fallback to any online node. What I think we need to do instead of hacking only the acpi code and not standardizing this across the kernel is: - reset cpu-to-node with a per-arch callback in generic cpu hotplug code at CPU_DEAD, and - do an iteration over all possible cpus for node hot-remove ensuring there are no stale references. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-numa" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html