Re: WARNING: possible circular locking dependency detected

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Tue Aug 29 2017 - 15:49:55 EST


On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 07:40:44PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

> One solution I'm looking into right now is to reverse the lock order and
> actually make the hotplug code do:
>
> watchdog_lock();
> cpu_write_lock();
>
> ....
> cpu_write_unlock();
> watchdog_unlock();
>
> and get rid of cpu_read_(un)lock() in the sysctl interface completely. I
> know it's ugly, but we have other locks we take in the hotplug path as
> well.

This is to serialize the sysctl against hotplug? I'm not immediately
seeing why watchdog_lock needs to be the outer most lock, is that
because of vfs locks or something?

> That solves that part of the issue, but it does not solve the
> release_ds_buffers() problem. Though with the watchdog_lock() mechanism, it
> allows me to do:
>
> ->park() := watchdog_disable()
> perf_event_disable(percpuevt);
> cleanup_event = percpuevt;
> percpuevt = NULL;
> and then
>
> watchdog_unlock()
> if (cleanup_event) {
> perf_event_release_ebent(cleanup_event);
> cleanup_event = NULL;
> }
> mutex_unlock(&watchdog_mutex);
>
> That should do the trick nicely for both user space functions and the cpu
> hotplug machinery.
>
> Though it's quite a rewrite of that mess, which is particularly non trivial
> because that extra non perf implementation in arch/powerpc which has its
> own NMI watchdog thingy wants its calls preserved. But AFAICT so far it
> should just work. Famous last words....
>
> Thoughts?

So I have a patch _somewhere_ that preserves the event<->cpu relation
across hotplug and disable/enable would be sufficient. If you want I can
try and dig that out and make it work again.

That would avoid having to do the destroy/create cycle of the watchdog
events.