Hello, Linus.
So, it turns out we had a silly bug in the most fundamental part of
workqueue for a very long time. AFAICS, this dates back to pre-git
era and has quite likely been there from the time workqueue was first
introduced.
A work item uses its PENDING bit to synchronize multiple queuers.
Anyone who wins the PENDING bit owns the pending state of the work
item. Whether a queuer wins or loses the race, one thing should be
guaranteed - there will soon be at least one execution of the work
item - where "after" means that the execution instance would be able
to see all the changes that the queuer has made prior to the queueing
attempt.
Unfortunately, we were missing a smp_rmb() after clearing PENDING for
execution, so nothing guaranteed visibility of the changes that a
queueing loser has made, which manifested as a reproducible blk-mq
stall.
Lots of kudos to Roman for debugging the problem. The patch for
-stable is the minimal one. For v3.7, Peter is working on a patch to
make the code path slightly more efficient and less fragile.
Thanks.
The following changes since commit f7813ad5cbfd1fab2899914281b72a1ba0805c80:
Merge tag 'for-linus-4.6' of git://git.code.sf.net/p/openipmi/linux-ipmi
(2016-03-18 10:21:04 -0700)
are available in the git repository at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/wq.git for-4.6-fixes
for you to fetch changes up to 346c09f80459a3ad97df1816d6d606169a51001a:
workqueue: fix ghost PENDING flag while doing MQ IO (2016-04-26 11:23:22
-0400)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Roman Pen (1):
workqueue: fix ghost PENDING flag while doing MQ IO
kernel/workqueue.c | 29 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 29 insertions(+)
--
tejun
