3.8-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know. ------------------ From: Stefan Bader <stefan.bader@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> commit 76eaca031f0af2bb303e405986f637811956a422 upstream. There is a loophole between Xen's current implementation of pv-spinlocks and the scheduler. This was triggerable through a testcase until v3.6 changed the TLB flushing code. The problem potentially is still there just not observable in the same way. What could happen was (is): 1. CPU n tries to schedule task x away and goes into a slow wait for the runq lock of CPU n-# (must be one with a lower number). 2. CPU n-#, while processing softirqs, tries to balance domains and goes into a slow wait for its own runq lock (for updating some records). Since this is a spin_lock_irqsave in softirq context, interrupts will be re-enabled for the duration of the poll_irq hypercall used by Xen. 3. Before the runq lock of CPU n-# is unlocked, CPU n-1 receives an interrupt (e.g. endio) and when processing the interrupt, tries to wake up task x. But that is in schedule and still on_cpu, so try_to_wake_up goes into a tight loop. 4. The runq lock of CPU n-# gets unlocked, but the message only gets sent to the first waiter, which is CPU n-# and that is busily stuck. 5. CPU n-# never returns from the nested interruption to take and release the lock because the scheduler uses a busy wait. And CPU n never finishes the task migration because the unlock notification only went to CPU n-#. To avoid this and since the unlocking code has no real sense of which waiter is best suited to grab the lock, just send the IPI to all of them. This causes the waiters to return from the hyper- call (those not interrupted at least) and do active spinlocking. BugLink: http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1011792 Acked-by: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Stefan Bader <stefan.bader@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-) --- a/arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c +++ b/arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c @@ -328,7 +328,6 @@ static noinline void xen_spin_unlock_slo if (per_cpu(lock_spinners, cpu) == xl) { ADD_STATS(released_slow_kicked, 1); xen_send_IPI_one(cpu, XEN_SPIN_UNLOCK_VECTOR); - break; } } } -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html