Re: [patch, 2.6.10-rc2] sched: fix ->nr_uninterruptible handlingbugs

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Tue Nov 16 2004 - 17:54:38 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
PREEMPT_RT on SMP systems triggered weird (very high) load average
values rather easily, which turned out to be a mainline kernel
->nr_uninterruptible handling bug in try_to_wake_up().

the following code:

if (old_state == TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE) {
old_rq->nr_uninterruptible--;

potentially executes with old_rq potentially being != rq, and hence
updating ->nr_uninterruptible without the lock held. Given a
sufficiently concurrent preemption workload the count can get out of
whack and updates might get lost, permanently skewing the global count. Nothing except the load-average uses nr_uninterruptible() so this
condition can go unnoticed quite easily.


Hi Ingo,
Yes you're right.

I have another idea. Revert back to the old code, then just transfer
the nr_uninterruptible count when migrating a task. That way, the
rq's nr_uninterruptible field always is a measure of the number of
uninterruptible tasks on it. What do you think?

Nick
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/