During CPU offline, stop-machine is used to take control over all the online CPUs (via the per-cpu stopper thread) and then run take_cpu_down() on the CPU that is to be taken offline.
But stop-machine itself has several stages: _PREPARE, _DISABLE_IRQ, _RUN etc. The important thing to note here is that the _DISABLE_IRQ stage comes much later after starting stop-machine, and hence there is a large window where other CPUs can send IPIs to the CPU going offline. As a result, we can encounter a scenario as depicted below, which causes IPIs to be sent to the CPU going offline, and that CPU notices them *after* it has gone offline, triggering the "IPI-to-offline-CPU" warning from the smp-call-function code. CPU 1 CPU 2 (Online CPU) (CPU going offline) Enter _PREPARE stage Enter _PREPARE stage Enter _DISABLE_IRQ stage = Got a device interrupt, | Didn't notice the IPI and the interrupt handler | since interrupts were called smp_call_function() | disabled on this CPU. and sent an IPI to CPU 2. | = Enter _DISABLE_IRQ stage Enter _RUN stage Enter _RUN stage = Busy loop with interrupts | Invoke take_cpu_down() disabled. | and take CPU 2 offline = Enter _EXIT stage Enter _EXIT stage Re-enable interrupts Re-enable interrupts The pending IPI is noted immediately, but alas, the CPU is offline at this point. So, as we can observe from this scenario, the IPI was sent when CPU 2 was still online, and hence it was perfectly legal. But unfortunately it was noted only after CPU 2 went offline, resulting in the warning from the IPI handling code. In other words, the fault was not at the sender, but at the receiver side - and if we look closely, the real bug is in the stop-machine sequence itself. The problem here is that the CPU going offline disabled its local interrupts (by entering _DISABLE_IRQ phase) *before* the other CPUs. And that's the reason why it was not able to respond to the IPI before going offline. A simple solution to this problem is to ensure that the CPU going offline *follows* all other CPUs while entering each subsequent phase within stop-machine. In particular, all other CPUs will enter the _DISABLE_IRQ phase and disable their local interrupts, and only *then*, the CPU going offline will follow suit. Since the other CPUs are executing the stop-machine code with interrupts disabled, they won't send any IPIs at all, at that point. And by the time stop-machine ends, the CPU would have gone offline and disappeared from the cpu_online_mask, and hence future invocations of smp_call_function() and friends will automatically prune that CPU out. Thus, we can guarantee that no CPU will end up *inadvertently* sending IPIs to an offline CPU. We can implement this by introducing a "holding area" for the CPUs marked as 'active_cpus', and use this infrastructure to let the other CPUs progress from one stage to the next, before allowing the active_cpus to do the same thing. Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.b...@linux.vnet.ibm.com> --- kernel/stop_machine.c | 22 +++++++++++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/kernel/stop_machine.c b/kernel/stop_machine.c index 01fbae5..d65168e 100644 --- a/kernel/stop_machine.c +++ b/kernel/stop_machine.c @@ -165,12 +165,21 @@ static void ack_state(struct multi_stop_data *msdata) set_state(msdata, msdata->state + 1); } +/* Holding area for active CPUs, to let all the non-active CPUs go first */ +static void hold_active_cpus(struct multi_stop_data *msdata, + int num_active_cpus) +{ + /* Wait until all the non-active threads ack the state */ + while (atomic_read(&msdata->thread_ack) > num_active_cpus) + cpu_relax(); +} + /* This is the cpu_stop function which stops the CPU. */ static int multi_cpu_stop(void *data) { struct multi_stop_data *msdata = data; enum multi_stop_state curstate = MULTI_STOP_NONE; - int cpu = smp_processor_id(), err = 0; + int cpu = smp_processor_id(), num_active_cpus, err = 0; unsigned long flags; bool is_active; @@ -180,15 +189,22 @@ static int multi_cpu_stop(void *data) */ local_save_flags(flags); - if (!msdata->active_cpus) + if (!msdata->active_cpus) { is_active = cpu == cpumask_first(cpu_online_mask); - else + num_active_cpus = 1; + } else { is_active = cpumask_test_cpu(cpu, msdata->active_cpus); + num_active_cpus = cpumask_weight(msdata->active_cpus); + } /* Simple state machine */ do { /* Chill out and ensure we re-read multi_stop_state. */ cpu_relax(); + + if (is_active) + hold_active_cpus(msdata, num_active_cpus); + if (msdata->state != curstate) { curstate = msdata->state; switch (curstate) { -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/