On 8/2/21 8:37 AM, Michael Ellerman wrote:
> Cédric Le Goater <clg@xxxxxxxx> writes:
>> On PowerVM, CPU-less nodes can be populated with hot-plugged CPUs at
>> runtime. Today, the IPI is not created for such nodes, and hot-plugged
>> CPUs use a bogus IPI, which leads to soft lockups.
>>
>> We could create the node IPI on demand but it is a bit complex because
>> this code would be called under bringup_up() and some IRQ locking is
>> being done. The simplest solution is to create the IPIs for all nodes
>> at startup.
>>
>> Fixes: 7dcc37b3eff9 ("powerpc/xive: Map one IPI interrupt per node")
>> Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # v5.13
>> Reported-by: Geetika Moolchandani <Geetika.Moolchandani1@xxxxxxx>
>> Cc: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Signed-off-by: Cédric Le Goater <clg@xxxxxxxx>
>> ---
>>
>> This patch breaks old versions of irqbalance (<= v1.4). Possible nodes
>> are collected from /sys/devices/system/node/ but CPU-less nodes are
>> not listed there. When interrupts are scanned, the link representing
>> the node structure is NULL and segfault occurs.
>
> Breaking userspace is usually frowned upon, even if it is irqbalance.
>
> If CPU-less nodes appeared in /sys/devices/system/node would that fix
> it? Could we do that or is that not possible for other reasons?
>
>> Version 1.7 seems immune.
>
> Which was released in August 2020.
>
> Looks like some distros still ship 1.6, I take it you're not sure if
> that is broken or not.
I did a bisect on irqbalance and the "bad" commit was introduced between
version 1.7 and version 1.8 :
commit 31dea01f3a47 ("Also fetch node info for non-PCI devices")
https://github.com/Irqbalance/irqbalance/commit/31dea01f3a47aa6374560638486879e5129f9c94
which was backported on RHEL 8 in RPM irqbalance-1.4.0-6.el8.
Any distro using irqbalance <= 1.7 without the patch above is fine.
Since irqbalance handled cleanly irqs referencing offline nodes before
this patch, I am inclined to think that the irqbalance fix is incomplete.
Unfortunately, the commit log lacks some context on the non-PCI devices.
Thanks,
C.
