Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:42:48 +0100
From: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
To: Sachin Sant <sachinp@in.ibm.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>,
       Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>,
       Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>, heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] slqb: Do not use DEFINE_PER_CPU for per-node data
Message-ID: <20090921084248.GC12726@csn.ul.ie>
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On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 02:00:30PM +0530, Sachin Sant wrote:
> Tejun Heo wrote:
>> Pekka Enberg wrote:
>>   
>>> Tejun Heo wrote:
>>>     
>>>> Pekka Enberg wrote:
>>>>       
>>>>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 10:34 PM, Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> wrote:
>>>>>         
>>>>>> SLQB used a seemingly nice hack to allocate per-node data for the
>>>>>> statically
>>>>>> initialised caches. Unfortunately, due to some unknown per-cpu
>>>>>> optimisation, these regions are being reused by something else as the
>>>>>> per-node data is getting randomly scrambled. This patch fixes the
>>>>>> problem but it's not fully understood *why* it fixes the problem at the
>>>>>> moment.
>>>>>>           
>>>>> Ouch, that sounds bad. I guess it's architecture specific bug as x86
>>>>> works ok? Lets CC Tejun.
>>>>>         
>>>> Is the corruption being seen on ppc or s390?
>>>>       
>>> On ppc.
>>>     
>>
>> Can you please post full dmesg showing the corruption? 

There isn't a useful dmesg available and my evidence that it's within the
pcpu allocator is a bit weak. Symptons are crashing within SLQB when a
second CPU is brought up due to a bad data access with a declared per-cpu
area. Sometimes it'll look like the value was NULL and other times it's a
random.

The "per-cpu" area in this case is actually a per-node area. This implied that
it was either racing (but the locking looked sound), a buffer overflow (but
I couldn't find one) or the per-cpu areas were being written to by something
else unrelated. I considered it possible that as the CPU and node numbers did
not match up that the unused numbers were being freed up for use elsewhere. I
haven't dug into the per-cpu implementation to see if this is a possibility.

>> Also, if you
>> apply the attached patch, does the added BUG_ON() trigger?
>>   
> I applied the three patches from Mel and one from Tejun.

Thanks Sachin

Was there any useful result from Tejun's patch applied on its own?

> With these patches applied the machine boots past
> the original reported SLQB problem, but then hangs
> just after printing these messages.
>
> <6>ehea: eth0: Physical port up
> <7>irq: irq 33539 on host null mapped to virtual irq 259
> <6>ehea: External switch port is backup port
> <7>irq: irq 33540 on host null mapped to virtual irq 260
> <6>NET: Registered protocol family 10
> ^^^^^^ Hangs at this point.
>
> Tejun, the above hang looks exactly the same as the one
> i have reported here :
>
> http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2009-September/075791.html
>
> This particular hang was bisected to the following patch
>
> powerpc64: convert to dynamic percpu allocator
>
> This hang can be recreated without SLQB. So i think this is a different
> problem. 
>

Was that bug ever resolved?

> I have attached the complete dmesg log here.
>

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
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