When PREEMPT_RT is enabled, the soft interrupt thread can be preempted. If
the soft interrupt thread is preempted in the middle of a timer callback,
then calling del_timer_sync() can lead to two issues:
- If the caller is on a remote CPU then it has to spin wait for the timer
handler to complete. This can result in unbound priority inversion.
- If the caller originates from the task which preempted the timer
handler on the same CPU, then spin waiting for the timer handler to
complete is never going to end.
To avoid these issues, add a new lock to the timer base which is held
around the execution of the timer callbacks. If del_timer_sync() detects
that the timer callback is currently running, it blocks on the expiry
lock. When the callback is finished, the expiry lock is dropped by the
softirq thread which wakes up the waiter and the system makes progress.
This addresses both the priority inversion and the life lock issues.
This mechanism is not used for timers which are marked IRQSAFE as for those
preemption is disabled accross the callback and therefore this situation
cannot happen. The callbacks for such timers need to be individually
audited for RT compliance.
The same issue can happen in virtual machines when the vCPU which runs a
timer callback is scheduled out. If a second vCPU of the same guest calls
del_timer_sync() it will spin wait for the other vCPU to be scheduled back
in. The expiry lock mechanism would avoid that. It'd be trivial to enable
this when paravirt spinlocks are enabled in a guest, but it's not clear
whether this is an actual problem in the wild, so for now it's an RT only
mechanism.
As the softirq thread can be preempted with PREEMPT_RT=y, the SMP variant
of del_timer_sync() needs to be used on UP as well.
[ tglx: Refactored it for mainline ]
Signed-off-by: Anna-Maria Gleixner <anna-maria@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190726185753.832418500@linutronix.de
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