Consider the following scenario under PREEMPT_RT: o A CFS task p0 gets throttled while holding read_lock(&lock) o A task p1 blocks on write_lock(&lock), making further readers enter the slowpath o A ktimers or ksoftirqd task blocks on read_lock(&lock) If the cfs_bandwidth.period_timer to replenish p0's runtime is enqueued on the same CPU as one where ktimers/ksoftirqd is blocked on read_lock(&lock), this creates a circular dependency. This has been observed to happen with: o fs/eventpoll.c::ep->lock o net/netlink/af_netlink.c::nl_table_lock (after hand-fixing the above) but can trigger with any rwlock that can be acquired in both process and softirq contexts. The linux-rt tree has had 1ea50f9636f0 ("softirq: Use a dedicated thread for timer wakeups.") which helped this scenario for non-rwlock locks by ensuring the throttled task would get PI'd to FIFO1 (ktimers' default priority). Unfortunately, rwlocks cannot sanely do PI as they allow multiple readers. Make the period_timer expire in hardirq context under PREEMPT_RT. The callback for this timer can end up doing a lot of work, but this is mitigated somewhat when using nohz_full / CPU isolation: the timers *are* pinned, but on the CPUs the taskgroups are created on, which is usually going to be HK CPUs. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/xhsmhttqvnall.mognet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ Signed-off-by: Valentin Schneider <vschneid@xxxxxxxxxx> --- kernel/sched/fair.c | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c index 8767988242ee3..15cf7de865a97 100644 --- a/kernel/sched/fair.c +++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c @@ -6236,7 +6236,7 @@ void init_cfs_bandwidth(struct cfs_bandwidth *cfs_b, struct cfs_bandwidth *paren cfs_b->hierarchical_quota = parent ? parent->hierarchical_quota : RUNTIME_INF; INIT_LIST_HEAD(&cfs_b->throttled_cfs_rq); - hrtimer_init(&cfs_b->period_timer, CLOCK_MONOTONIC, HRTIMER_MODE_ABS_PINNED); + hrtimer_init(&cfs_b->period_timer, CLOCK_MONOTONIC, HRTIMER_MODE_ABS_PINNED_HARD); cfs_b->period_timer.function = sched_cfs_period_timer; /* Add a random offset so that timers interleave */ @@ -6263,7 +6263,7 @@ void start_cfs_bandwidth(struct cfs_bandwidth *cfs_b) cfs_b->period_active = 1; hrtimer_forward_now(&cfs_b->period_timer, cfs_b->period); - hrtimer_start_expires(&cfs_b->period_timer, HRTIMER_MODE_ABS_PINNED); + hrtimer_start_expires(&cfs_b->period_timer, HRTIMER_MODE_ABS_PINNED_HARD); } static void destroy_cfs_bandwidth(struct cfs_bandwidth *cfs_b) -- 2.41.0