• Roland Dreier's avatar
    sched: fix wait_for_completion_timeout() spurious failure under heavy load · bb10ed09
    Roland Dreier authored
    It seems that the current implementaton of wait_for_completion_timeout()
    has a small problem under very high load for the common pattern:
    
    	if (!wait_for_completion_timeout(&done, timeout))
    		/* handle failure */
    
    because the implementation very roughly does (lots of code deleted to
    show the basic flow):
    
    	static inline long __sched
    	do_wait_for_common(struct completion *x, long timeout, int state)
    	{
    		if (x->done)
    			return timeout;
    
    		do {
    			timeout = schedule_timeout(timeout);
    
    			if (!timeout)
    				return timeout;
    
    		} while (!x->done);
    
    		return timeout;
    	}
    
    so if the system is very busy and x->done is not set when
    do_wait_for_common() is entered, it is possible that the first call to
    schedule_timeout() returns 0 because the task doing wait_for_completion
    doesn't get rescheduled for a long time, even if it is woken up early
    enough.
    
    In this case, wait_for_completion_timeout() returns 0 without even
    checking x->done again, and the code above falls into its failure case
    purely for scheduler reasons, even if the hardware event or whatever was
    being waited for happened early enough.
    
    It would make sense to add an extra test to do_wait_for() in the timeout
    case and return 1 if x->done is actually set.
    
    A quick audit (not exhaustive) of wait_for_completion_timeout() callers
    seems to indicate that no one actually cares about the return value in
    the success case -- they just test for 0 (timed out) versus non-zero
    (wait succeeded).
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    bb10ed09
sched.c 213 KB