Impact: avoid recursive kfree calls, less slab activity on heavy load
debugobjects checks on kfree whether tracked objects are freed. When a
tracked object is freed debugobjects frees the internal reference
object as well. The debug object slab cache is marked to not recurse
into debugobjects when a slab objects is freed, but the recursive call
can be problematic versus locking in the memory allocator.
Defer the freeing of debug slab objects via schedule_work. The reasons
not to use RCU are:
1) rcu makes the data structure larger
2) there is no real need for rcu as nothing references the obj after
we freed it
3) under heavy load it is easier to reuse the to be freed objects instead
of allocating new objects from the slab. This lowered the slab activity
significantly in a heavy load networking test where lots of timers are
created/destroyed. The workqueue based delayed free allows us just to
put the to be freed objects back into the object pool and reuse them
right away.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
LKML-Reference: <200903162049.58058.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Impact: refactor/consolidate object management, prepare for delayed free
debugobjects allocates static reference objects to track objects which
are initialized or activated before the slab cache becomes
available. These static reference objects have to be handled
seperately in free_object(). The handling of these objects is in the
way of implementing a delayed free functionality. The delayed free is
required to avoid callbacks into the mm code from
debug_check_no_obj_freed().
Replace the static object references with dynamic ones after the slab
cache has been initialized. The static objects are now marked initdata.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
LKML-Reference: <200903162049.58058.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
While trying to debug why my Atom netbook is falling over booting
rawhide debug-enabled kernels, I stumbled across the fact that we've
been enabling object debugging by default. However, once you default it
to on, you've got no way to turn it back off again at runtime.
Add a boolean toggle to turn it off. I would just make it an int
module_param, however people may already expect the boolean enable
behaviour, so just add an analogue for disabling.
Signed-off-by: Kyle McMartin <kyle@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Impact: add .config driven boot parameter default value
Right now debugobjects can only be activated if the debug_objects
boot parameter is passed in via the boot command line.
Make this more convenient (and randomizable) by also providing
a .config method. Enable it by default. (DEBUG_OBJECTS itself
is default-off)
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Daniel J. Blueman reported:
> =======================================================
> [ INFO: possible circular locking dependency detected ]
> 2.6.27-rc4-224c #1
> -------------------------------------------------------
> hald/4680 is trying to acquire lock:
> (&n->list_lock){++..}, at: [<ffffffff802bfa26>] add_partial+0x26/0x80
>
> but task is already holding lock:
> (&obj_hash[i].lock){++..}, at: [<ffffffff8041cfdc>]
> debug_object_free+0x5c/0x120
We fix it by moving the actual freeing to outside the lock (the lock
now only protects the list).
The pool lock is also promoted to irq-safe (suggested by Dan). It's
necessary because free_pool is now called outside the irq disabled
region. So we need to protect against an interrupt handler which calls
debug_object_init().
[tglx@linutronix.de: added hlist_move_list helper to avoid looping
through the list twice]
Reported-by: Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Use WARN() instead of a printk+WARN_ON() pair; this way the message becomes
part of the warning section for better reporting/collection. In addition, one
of the if() clauses collapes into the WARN() entirely now.
Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
lib/debugobjects.c has a function to test if an object is on the stack.
The block layer and ide needs it (they need to avoid DMA from/to stack
buffers). This patch moves the function to include/linux/sched.h so that
everyone can use it.
lib/debugobjects.c uses current->stack but this patch uses a
task_stack_page() accessor, which is a preferable way to access the stack.
Signed-off-by: FUJITA Tomonori <fujita.tomonori@lab.ntt.co.jp>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Daniel J Blueman reported:
| =======================================================
| [ INFO: possible circular locking dependency detected ]
| 2.6.26-rc5-201c #1
| -------------------------------------------------------
| nscd/3669 is trying to acquire lock:
| (&n->list_lock){.+..}, at: [<ffffffff802bab03>] deactivate_slab+0x173/0x1e0
|
| but task is already holding lock:
| (&obj_hash[i].lock){++..}, at: [<ffffffff803fa56f>]
| __debug_object_init+0x2f/0x350
|
| which lock already depends on the new lock.
There are two locks involved here; the first is a SLUB-local lock, and
the second is a debugobjects-local lock. They are basically taken in two
different orders:
1. SLUB { debugobjects { ... } }
2. debugobjects { SLUB { ... } }
This patch changes pattern #2 by trying to fill the memory pool (e.g.
the call into SLUB/kmalloc()) outside the debugobjects lock, so now the
two patterns look like this:
1. SLUB { debugobjects { ... } }
2. SLUB { } debugobjects { ... }
[ daniel.blueman@gmail.com: pool_lock needs to be taken irq safe in fill_pool ]
Reported-by: Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
We can see an ever repeating problem pattern with objects of any kind in the
kernel:
1) freeing of active objects
2) reinitialization of active objects
Both problems can be hard to debug because the crash happens at a point where
we have no chance to decode the root cause anymore. One problem spot are
kernel timers, where the detection of the problem often happens in interrupt
context and usually causes the machine to panic.
While working on a timer related bug report I had to hack specialized code
into the timer subsystem to get a reasonable hint for the root cause. This
debug hack was fine for temporary use, but far from a mergeable solution due
to the intrusiveness into the timer code.
The code further lacked the ability to detect and report the root cause
instantly and keep the system operational.
Keeping the system operational is important to get hold of the debug
information without special debugging aids like serial consoles and special
knowledge of the bug reporter.
The problems described above are not restricted to timers, but timers tend to
expose it usually in a full system crash. Other objects are less explosive,
but the symptoms caused by such mistakes can be even harder to debug.
Instead of creating specialized debugging code for the timer subsystem a
generic infrastructure is created which allows developers to verify their code
and provides an easy to enable debug facility for users in case of trouble.
The debugobjects core code keeps track of operations on static and dynamic
objects by inserting them into a hashed list and sanity checking them on
object operations and provides additional checks whenever kernel memory is
freed.
The tracked object operations are:
- initializing an object
- adding an object to a subsystem list
- deleting an object from a subsystem list
Each operation is sanity checked before the operation is executed and the
subsystem specific code can provide a fixup function which allows to prevent
the damage of the operation. When the sanity check triggers a warning message
and a stack trace is printed.
The list of operations can be extended if the need arises. For now it's
limited to the requirements of the first user (timers).
The core code enqueues the objects into hash buckets. The hash index is
generated from the address of the object to simplify the lookup for the check
on kfree/vfree. Each bucket has it's own spinlock to avoid contention on a
global lock.
The debug code can be compiled in without being active. The runtime overhead
is minimal and could be optimized by asm alternatives. A kernel command line
option enables the debugging code.
Thanks to Ingo Molnar for review, suggestions and cleanup patches.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Thomas Gleixner