Hi, On Wednesday 01 February 2006 12:47, Pavel Machek wrote: > > This is an experimantal patch aimed at the "unable to freeze processes under > > load" problem. > > > > On my box the 2.6.16-rc1-mm4 kernel with this patch applied survives the > > "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null" test. > > > > Please have a look. > > It makes it better (well, I used my own, simpler variant, but that > should not matter; patch is attached). I now can't reproduce hangs > with simple stress testing, This means the direction is right ... > but running kernel make alongside that > makes it hang sometimes. ... but there still is a race here. > Example of non-frozen gcc: > > gcc D EEE06A70 0 1750 1749 1751 > (NOTLB) > df85df38 00000046 bf878130 eee06a70 00004111 eee06a70 eee06a70 > 003d0900 > 00000000 c0137cf5 df85c000 00000000 c058ada2 c012503e ef2c915c > ef2c9030 > c1c0b480 7c3b8500 003d0927 df85c000 00000a98 7c3b8500 003d0927 > c0770800 > Call Trace: > [<c0137cf5>] attach_pid+0x25/0xb0 > [<c058ada2>] _write_unlock_irq+0x12/0x30 > [<c012503e>] copy_process+0xe5e/0x11b0 > [<c0588f74>] wait_for_completion+0x94/0xd0 > [<c0121690>] default_wake_function+0x0/0x10 > [<c01254d9>] do_fork+0x149/0x210 > [<c0101218>] sys_vfork+0x28/0x30 > [<c0103231>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb [I'm trying to understand this trace, but with not much success, so far. Apparently sys_vfork() calls do_fork() which calls copy_process(), which calls attach_pid(). But what default_wake_function() and wait_for_completion() are doing here? And where it got stuck, actually?] I think the problem is related to the kernel make using fork() heavily. Namely, if the parent process uses CLONE_VFORK, it will wait for the vfork completion. Now if the child process is frozen _before_ it completes the vfork completion, the parent will be unfreezeable. > ...maybe solving this would solve journalling problems, too? It is > similar AFAICT. There's a chance, I think. ;-) > diff --git a/kernel/power/disk.c b/kernel/power/disk.c > index e24446f..90d6c1a 100644 > --- a/kernel/power/disk.c > +++ b/kernel/power/disk.c > @@ -87,7 +87,6 @@ static int prepare_processes(void) > int error; > > pm_prepare_console(); > - sys_sync(); > disable_nonboot_cpus(); > > if (freeze_processes()) { > diff --git a/kernel/power/process.c b/kernel/power/process.c > index 02a1b3a..bd16e44 100644 > --- a/kernel/power/process.c > +++ b/kernel/power/process.c > @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ > /* > * Timeout for stopping processes > */ > -#define TIMEOUT (6 * HZ) > +#define TIMEOUT (60 * HZ) > > > static inline int freezeable(struct task_struct * p) > @@ -54,32 +54,53 @@ void refrigerator(void) > current->state = save; > } > > +static void freeze_process(struct task_struct *p) > +{ > + unsigned long flags; > + > + freeze(p); > + spin_lock_irqsave(&p->sighand->siglock, flags); > + signal_wake_up(p, 0); > + spin_unlock_irqrestore(&p->sighand->siglock, flags); > +} > + > /* 0 = success, else # of processes that we failed to stop */ > int freeze_processes(void) > { > - int todo; > + int todo, user_frozen, nr_user; > unsigned long start_time; > struct task_struct *g, *p; > unsigned long flags; > > printk( "Stopping tasks: " ); > start_time = jiffies; > + user_frozen = 0; > do { > - todo = 0; > + nr_user = todo = 0; > read_lock(&tasklist_lock); > do_each_thread(g, p) { > if (!freezeable(p)) > continue; > if (frozen(p)) > continue; > - > - freeze(p); > - spin_lock_irqsave(&p->sighand->siglock, flags); > - signal_wake_up(p, 0); > - spin_unlock_irqrestore(&p->sighand->siglock, flags); > - todo++; > + if (p->mm) { This one is too simplistic, it appears. We should lock the task to check its mm and there may be kernel threads with non-null mm (they have the PF_BORROWED_MM flag set though, so we have to check this too). > + /* The task is a user-space one. Freeze it */ > + freeze_process(p); > + todo++; I think you can drop this ... > + nr_user++; > + } else { > + /* Freeze only if the user space is frozen */ > + if (user_frozen) > + freeze_process(p); > + todo++; > + } > } while_each_thread(g, p); > read_unlock(&tasklist_lock); ... if you do + todo += nr_user; > + if (!user_frozen && !nr_user) { > + printk("sync"); > + sys_sync(); > + } > + user_frozen = !nr_user; > yield(); /* Yield is okay here */ > if (todo && time_after(jiffies, start_time + TIMEOUT)) { > printk( "\n" ); }-- debugging stuff snipped --{ Greetings, Rafael