Re: [BUG] 8e274732115f ("printk: extend console_lock for per-console locking")

[John Ogness]

On 2022-06-12, "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> As I suspected, the final printk's cannot direct print because the
>> kthread was printing. Using the below patch did seem to address your
>> problem. But this is probably not the way forward.
>
> When I apply it, I still lose output, perhaps due to different timing?
> Doing the pr_flush(1000, true) just before the call to kernel_power_off()
> has been working quite well thus far, though.

Your pr_flush() is appropriate for your RCU tests, but this is a problem
in general that needs to be addressed. I suppose we should start a new
thread for that. ;-)

During development we experimented with the idea of kthreads pausing
themselves whenever direct printing is activated. It was racey because
there are situations when direct printing is only temporarily active and
it was hard to coordinate who prints when direct printing becomes
inactive again. So we dropped that idea. However, in this situation the
system will not be disabling direct printing.

@Paul, can you try the below change instead? Until this has been
officially solved, you probably want to keep your pr_flush()
solution. (After all, that is exactly what pr_flush() is for.) But it
would be helpful if you could run this last test for us.

@Petr, I like the idea of the kthreads getting out of the way rather
than trying to direct print themselves (for this situation). It still
isn't optimal because that final pr_emerg("Power down\n") might come
before the kthread has finished its current line. But in that case the
kthread may not have much a chance to finish the printing anyway.

John Ogness

diff --git a/kernel/printk/printk.c b/kernel/printk/printk.c
index ea3dd55709e7..45c6c2b0b104 100644
--- a/kernel/printk/printk.c
+++ b/kernel/printk/printk.c
@@ -3729,7 +3729,9 @@ static bool printer_should_wake(struct console *con, u64 seq)
 		return true;
 
 	if (con->blocked ||
-	    console_kthreads_atomically_blocked()) {
+	    console_kthreads_atomically_blocked() ||
+	    system_state > SYSTEM_RUNNING ||
+	    oops_in_progress) {
 		return false;
 	}