• Paul E. McKenney's avatar
    rcu: Restrict access to RCU CPU stall notifiers · 4e58aaee
    Paul E. McKenney authored
    Although the RCU CPU stall notifiers can be useful for dumping state when
    tracking down delicate forward-progress bugs where NUMA effects cause
    cache lines to be delivered to a given CPU regularly, but always in a
    state that prevents that CPU from making forward progress.  These bugs can
    be detected by the RCU CPU stall-warning mechanism, but in some cases,
    the stall-warnings printk()s disrupt the forward-progress bug before
    any useful state can be obtained.
    
    Unfortunately, the notifier mechanism added by commit 5b404fda ("rcu:
    Add RCU CPU stall notifier") can make matters worse if used at all
    carelessly. For example, if the stall warning was caused by a lock not
    being released, then any attempt to acquire that lock in the notifier
    will hang. This will prevent not only the notifier from producing any
    useful output, but it will also prevent the stall-warning message from
    ever appearing.
    
    This commit therefore hides this new RCU CPU stall notifier
    mechanism under a new RCU_CPU_STALL_NOTIFIER Kconfig option that
    depends on both DEBUG_KERNEL and RCU_EXPERT.  In addition, the
    rcupdate.rcu_cpu_stall_notifiers=1 kernel boot parameter must also
    be specified.  The RCU_CPU_STALL_NOTIFIER Kconfig option's help text
    contains a warning and explains the dangers of careless use, recommending
    lockless notifier code.  In addition, a WARN() is triggered each time
    that an attempt is made to register a stall-warning notifier in kernels
    built with CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_NOTIFIER=y.
    
    This combination of measures will keep use of this mechanism confined to
    debug kernels and away from routine deployments.
    
    [ paulmck: Apply Dan Carpenter feedback. ]
    
    Fixes: 5b404fda ("rcu: Add RCU CPU stall notifier")
    Reported-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarJoel Fernandes (Google) <joel@joelfernandes.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNeeraj Upadhyay (AMD) <neeraj.iitr10@gmail.com>
    4e58aaee
update.c 20.2 KB