Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756409AbXJ0PaG (ORCPT ); Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:30:06 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751933AbXJ0P3z (ORCPT ); Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:29:55 -0400 Received: from pentafluge.infradead.org ([213.146.154.40]:54161 "EHLO pentafluge.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751313AbXJ0P3z (ORCPT ); Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:29:55 -0400 Subject: Re: BUG: lock held when returning to user space From: Peter Zijlstra To: Jiri Kosina Cc: Gabriel C , a.zummo@towertech.it, Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andrew Morton , rtc-linux@googlegroups.com, Ingo Molnar , Linus Torvalds In-Reply-To: References: <472348F6.6050100@googlemail.com> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 17:28:41 +0200 Message-Id: <1193498921.5648.68.camel@lappy> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.12.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1892 Lines: 43 On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 17:12 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote: > On Sat, 27 Oct 2007, Gabriel C wrote: > > > I found that today in dmesg after booting current git ( > > ec3b67c11df42362ccda81261d62829042f223f0 ) : > > ... > > [ 592.752777] > > [ 592.752781] ================================================ > > [ 592.753478] [ BUG: lock held when returning to user space! ] > > [ 592.753880] ------------------------------------------------ > > [ 592.754262] hwclock/1452 is leaving the kernel with locks still held! > > [ 592.754655] 1 lock held by hwclock/1452: > > [ 592.755007] #0: (&rtc->char_lock){--..}, at: [] rtc_dev_open+0x2e/0x7e > > Yes, this is because rtc keeps a char_lock mutex locked as long as the > device is open, to avoid concurrent accessess. > > It could be easily substituted by some counting -- setting and clearing > bit in struct rtc_device instead of using char_lock, but doing this just > to shut the lockdep off is questionable imho. > > Peter, what is the preferred way to annotate these kinds of locking for > lockdep to express that it is intended? Not sure, I'd not thought that anyone would actually want to do this. I'm also not sure how I stand on this, I'd prefer to say: don't do this! I think, in this case, the lock is associated with a kernel object that is properly cleaned up if the holding tasks gets a SIGKILL. But in general I'd like to see this kind of thing go away. Now I could probably come up with an annotation to hide it, but what do other people think, Ingo, Linus, Andrew, do we want to keep kernel locks held over userspace? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/