Re: [RFC] Badness in __mutex_unlock_slowpath with XFS stress tests

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Hi Nathan,

Nathan Scott wrote:
On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 12:47:01PM +0530, Suzuki wrote:

Hi all,


Hi there Suzuki,


I was working on an issue with getting "Badness in
__mutex_unlock_slowpath" and hence a stack trace, while running FS
stress tests on XFS on 2.6.16-rc5 kernel.


Thanks for looking into this.


The dmesg looks like :

Badness in __mutex_unlock_slowpath at kernel/mutex.c:207
[<c0103c0c>] show_trace+0x20/0x22
[<c0103d4b>] dump_stack+0x1e/0x20
[<c0473f1f>] __mutex_unlock_slowpath+0x12a/0x23b
[<c0473938>] mutex_unlock+0xb/0xd
[<c02a5720>] xfs_read+0x230/0x2d9
[<c02a1bed>] linvfs_aio_read+0x8d/0x98
[<c015f3df>] do_sync_read+0xb8/0x107
[<c015f4f7>] vfs_read+0xc9/0x19b
[<c015f8b2>] sys_read+0x47/0x6e
[<c0102db7>] sysenter_past_esp+0x54/0x75


Yeah, test 008 from the xfstests suite was reliably hitting this for
me, it'd just not percolated to the top of my todo list yet.


This happens with XFS DIO reads. xfs_read holds the i_mutex and issues a
__generic_file_aio_read(), which falls into __blockdev_direct_IO with
DIO_OWN_LOCKING flag (since xfs uses own_locking ). Now
__blockdev_direct_IO releases the i_mutex for READs with
DIO_OWN_LOCKING.When it returns to xfs_read, it tries to unlock the
i_mutex ( which is now already unlocked), causing the "Badness".


Indeed.  And there's the problem - why is XFS releasing i_mutex
for the direct read in xfs_read?  Shouldn't be - fs/direct-io.c
will always release i_mutex for a direct read in the own-locking
case, so XFS shouldn't be doing it too (thats what the code does
and thats what the comment preceding __blockdev_direct_IO says).

The only piece of the puzzle I don't understand is why we don't
always get that badness message at the end of every direct read.
Perhaps its some subtle fastpath/slowpath difference, or maybe
"debug_mutex_on" gets switched off after the first occurance...

Yes, the debug_mutex_on gets switched off after the first occurence.


Anyway, with the above change (remove 2 lines near xfs_read end),
I can no longer reproduce the problem in that previously-warning
test case, and all the other XFS tests seem to be chugging along
OK (which includes a healthy mix of dio testing).


The possible solution which we can think of, is not to unlock the
i_mutex for DIO_OWN_LOCKING. This will only affect the DIO_OWN_LOCKING users (as of now, only XFS ) with concurrent DIO sync read requests. AIO read requests would not suffer this problem since they would just return once the DIO is submitted.


I don't think that level of invasiveness is necessary at this stage,
but perhaps you're seeing something that I've missed?  Do you see
any reason why removing the xfs_read unlock wont work?


But, what happens if __generic_file_aio_read() hits some error before doing the aops->direct_IO ?


Another work around for this can  be adding a check "mutex_is_locked"
before trying to unlock i_mutex in xfs_read. But this seems to be an
ugly hack. :(


Hmm, that just plain wouldn't work - what if the lock was released
in generic direct IO code, and someone else had acquired it before
we got to the end of xfs_read?  Badness for sure.

cheers.


Suzuki.
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