From: Denis V. Lunev <[email protected]> A production compute node carrying a few thousand datapath flows hit a soft lockup inside a single netlink flow dump and panicked.
ovs_flow_cmd_dump() calls ovs_flow_stats_get() for every flow it emits, and that releases stats->lock with spin_unlock_bh() once per CPU that has touched the flow. Every release is a local_bh_enable(), and each one runs the pending softirq backlog in the dumping thread's own context. The skb bounds how many flows one callback emits, and a large but sparse table adds only a walk over empty buckets, so no dumper carries a budget of its own. Neither bounds the softirq work the callback absorbs. On a CPU that carries the box's packet load the backlog refills as fast as it drains, so the dumping thread becomes that CPU's softirq engine. It never sleeps and it has no reschedule point, so under voluntary preemption nothing can take the CPU away from it: neither the ksoftirqd the kernel woke to take the work over, nor the stopper thread the softlockup detector dispatches to refresh its timestamp. Hold BH off across the whole callback instead, the way ctnetlink_dump_table() does, so the nested spin_unlock_bh() stop draining softirqs. The loop already runs under rcu_read_lock() and cannot sleep. What it gives up is preemption under CONFIG_PREEMPT, since a BH-off region is not preemptible outside PREEMPT_RT. That region is bounded by the skb and the table size, where the softirq backlog it used to absorb is not. Signed-off-by: Denis V. Lunev <[email protected]> --- v2: - leave ovs_vport_cmd_dump() alone: nsid_lock has not been BH-safe since commit aed4969f2bdf ("net: net->nsid_lock does not need BH safety"), so the vport dump never drained softirqs - disable BH before the table dereference and say in a comment that the region is not there for safety - drop the ovs_flow_stats_get() history, note the empty-bucket walk and the lost CONFIG_PREEMPT preemption in the message - move the Cc list out of the commit message, add the net prefix net/openvswitch/datapath.c | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) diff --git a/net/openvswitch/datapath.c b/net/openvswitch/datapath.c index 631a03136fa1..a80bac81c043 100644 --- a/net/openvswitch/datapath.c +++ b/net/openvswitch/datapath.c @@ -1532,6 +1532,11 @@ static int ovs_flow_cmd_dump(struct sk_buff *skb, struct netlink_callback *cb) return -ENODEV; } + /* + * Not needed for safety. Stops every spin_unlock_bh() in + * ovs_flow_stats_get() from running the softirq backlog here. + */ + local_bh_disable(); ti = rcu_dereference(dp->table.ti); for (;;) { struct sw_flow *flow; @@ -1552,6 +1557,7 @@ static int ovs_flow_cmd_dump(struct sk_buff *skb, struct netlink_callback *cb) cb->args[0] = bucket; cb->args[1] = obj; } + local_bh_enable(); rcu_read_unlock(); return skb->len; } -- 2.53.0 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
