The patch titled Subject: dump_stack: avoid the livelock of the dump_lock has been added to the -mm tree. Its filename is dump_stack-avoid-the-livelock-of-the-dump_lock.patch This patch should soon appear at http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmots/broken-out/dump_stack-avoid-the-livelock-of-the-dump_lock.patch and later at http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmotm/broken-out/dump_stack-avoid-the-livelock-of-the-dump_lock.patch Before you just go and hit "reply", please: a) Consider who else should be cc'ed b) Prefer to cc a suitable mailing list as well c) Ideally: find the original patch on the mailing list and do a reply-to-all to that, adding suitable additional cc's *** Remember to use Documentation/process/submit-checklist.rst when testing your code *** The -mm tree is included into linux-next and is updated there every 3-4 working days ------------------------------------------------------ From: Kevin Hao <haokexin@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: dump_stack: avoid the livelock of the dump_lock In the current code, we use the atomic_cmpxchg() to serialize the output of the dump_stack(), but this implementation suffers the thundering herd problem. We have observed such kind of livelock on a Marvell cn96xx board(24 cpus) when heavily using the dump_stack() in a kprobe handler. Actually we can let the competitors to wait for the releasing of the lock before jumping to atomic_cmpxchg(). This will definitely mitigate the thundering herd problem. Thanks Linus for the suggestion. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191030031637.6025-1-haokexin@xxxxxxxxx Fixes: b58d977432c8 ("dump_stack: serialize the output from dump_stack()") Signed-off-by: Kevin Hao <haokexin@xxxxxxxxx> Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- lib/dump_stack.c | 6 +++++- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) --- a/lib/dump_stack.c~dump_stack-avoid-the-livelock-of-the-dump_lock +++ a/lib/dump_stack.c @@ -106,7 +106,11 @@ retry: was_locked = 1; } else { local_irq_restore(flags); - cpu_relax(); + /* + * Wait the lock to release before jumping to atomic_cmpxchg() + * in order to mitigate the thundering herd problem. + */ + do { cpu_relax(); } while (atomic_read(&dump_lock) != -1); goto retry; } _ Patches currently in -mm which might be from haokexin@xxxxxxxxx are dump_stack-avoid-the-livelock-of-the-dump_lock.patch