[dm-devel] Re: [PATCH] dm: Fix deadlock under high i/o load in raid1 setup.
Andrew Morton
akpm at linux-foundation.org
Wed Aug 15 22:56:04 UTC 2007
On Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:33:40 +0200
Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens at de.ibm.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the patch below went into 2.6.18. Now my question is: why doesn't it check
> if kmalloc(..., GFP_NOIO) returns with a NULL pointer?
> Did I miss anything that guarentees that this will always succeed or is it
> just a bug?
How come my computer is the only one with a reply button?
Sigh.
> commit c06aad854fdb9da38fcc22dccfe9d72919453e43
> Author: Daniel Kobras <kobras at linux.de>
> Date: Sun Aug 27 01:23:24 2006 -0700
>
> [PATCH] dm: Fix deadlock under high i/o load in raid1 setup.
>
> On an nForce4-equipped machine with two SATA disk in raid1 setup using dmraid,
> we experienced frequent deadlock of the system under high i/o load. 'cat
> /dev/zero > ~/zero' was the most reliable way to reproduce them: Randomly
> after a few GB, 'cp' would be left in 'D' state along with kjournald and
> kmirrord. The functions cp and kjournald were blocked in did vary, but
> kmirrord's wchan always pointed to 'mempool_alloc()'. We've seen this pattern
> on 2.6.15 and 2.6.17 kernels. http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/20/142 indicates
> that this problem has been around even before.
>
> So much for the facts, here's my interpretation: mempool_alloc() first tries
> to atomically allocate the requested memory, or falls back to hand out
> preallocated chunks from the mempool. If both fail, it puts the calling
> process (kmirrord in this case) on a private waitqueue until somebody refills
> the pool. Where the only 'somebody' is kmirrord itself, so we have a
> deadlock.
>
> I worked around this problem by falling back to a (blocking) kmalloc when
> before kmirrord would have ended up on the waitqueue. This defeats part of
> the benefits of using the mempool, but at least keeps the system running. And
> it could be done with a two-line change. Note that mempool_alloc() clears the
> GFP_NOIO flag internally, and only uses it to decide whether to wait or return
> an error if immediate allocation fails, so the attached patch doesn't change
> behaviour in the non-deadlocking case. Path is against current git
> (2.6.18-rc4), but should apply to earlier versions as well. I've tested on
> 2.6.15, where this patch makes the difference between random lockup and a
> stable system.
>
> Signed-off-by: Daniel Kobras <kobras at linux.de>
> Acked-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk at redhat.com>
> Cc: <stable at kernel.org>
> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm at osdl.org>
> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at osdl.org>
>
> diff --git a/drivers/md/dm-raid1.c b/drivers/md/dm-raid1.c
> index be48ced..c54de98 100644
> --- a/drivers/md/dm-raid1.c
> +++ b/drivers/md/dm-raid1.c
> @@ -255,7 +255,9 @@ static struct region *__rh_alloc(struct region_hash *rh, region_t region)
> struct region *reg, *nreg;
>
> read_unlock(&rh->hash_lock);
> - nreg = mempool_alloc(rh->region_pool, GFP_NOIO);
> + nreg = mempool_alloc(rh->region_pool, GFP_ATOMIC);
> + if (unlikely(!nreg))
> + nreg = kmalloc(sizeof(struct region), GFP_NOIO);
> nreg->state = rh->log->type->in_sync(rh->log, region, 1) ?
> RH_CLEAN : RH_NOSYNC;
> nreg->rh = rh;
>
Yeah, that's a bug.
kmalloc(small_amount, GFP_NOIO) can fail if the calling process gets
oom-killed, and it can fail if the system is using fault-injection.
One could say "don't use fault injection" and, perhaps, "this is only
ever called by a kernel thread and kernel threads don't get oom-killed".
But the former is lame and the latter assumes current implementation
details which could change (and indeed have in the past).
So yes, I'd say this is a bug in DM.
Also, __rh_alloc() is called under read_lock(), via __rh_find(). If
__rh_alloc()'s mempool_alloc() fails, it will perform a sleeping allocation
under read_lock(), which is deadlockable and will generate might_sleep()
warnings
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