Re: WARN_ON_ONCE() in process_one_work()?

From: Paul E. McKenney
Date: Mon May 01 2017 - 14:58:28 EST


On Mon, May 01, 2017 at 02:44:02PM -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Paul.
>
> On Mon, May 01, 2017 at 11:38:07AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Mon, May 01, 2017 at 09:57:47AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > Hello!
> > >
> > > I am hitting this WARN_ON_ONCE() in process_one_work() and am wondering
> > > what I did wrong to make this happen:
> >
> > Oh, wait... Rescuer, it says. Might this be due to the fact that RCU's
> > expedited grace periods block within a workqueue handler? Might this
> > in turn run the system out of workqueue kthreads? If this is the likely
> > cause, my approach would be to rework the expected-grace-period workqueue
> > handler to return when waiting for the grace period to complete, and to
> > replace the current wakeup with a schedule_work() or something similar.
>
> That should be completely fine. It could just be that the rescuer
> path has a bug around CPU hotplug handling. Can you please confirm
> either way on the cpuset usage?

I have no explicit cpuset usage or affinity of the workqueue handlers
themselves.

However, this is thus far only happening in CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL=y runs, in
this case, with the kernel boot parameter nohz_full=2-9 out of 16 CPUs.
IIRC, this sets up a "housekeeping" cpuset that pushes normal tasks away
from the nohz_full CPUs.

I do build with CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=y, and the test does a lot of
hotplugging. Also, other kthreads (but again, not the workqueue handlers)
do a lot of explicit CPU-affinity manipulation.

Thanx, Paul