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Commit c1dc0b9c authored by Ingo Molnar's avatar Ingo Molnar
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debug lockups: Improve lockup detection



When debugging a recent lockup bug i found various deficiencies
in how our current lockup detection helpers work:

 - SysRq-L is not very efficient as it uses a workqueue, hence
   it cannot punch through hard lockups and cannot see through
   most soft lockups either.

 - The SysRq-L code depends on the NMI watchdog - which is off
   by default.

 - We dont print backtraces from the RCU code's built-in
   'RCU state machine is stuck' debug code. This debug
   code tends to be one of the first (and only) mechanisms
   that show that a lockup has occured.

This patch changes the code so taht we:

 - Trigger the NMI backtrace code from SysRq-L instead of using
   a workqueue (which cannot punch through hard lockups)

 - Trigger print-all-CPU-backtraces from the RCU lockup detection
   code

Also decouple the backtrace printing code from the NMI watchdog:

 - Dont use variable size cpumasks (it might not be initialized
   and they are a bit more fragile anyway)

 - Trigger an NMI immediately via an IPI, instead of waiting
   for the NMI tick to occur. This is a lot faster and can
   produce more relevant backtraces. It will also work if the
   NMI watchdog is disabled.

 - Dont print the 'dazed and confused' message when we print
   a backtrace from the NMI

 - Do a show_regs() plus a dump_stack() to get maximum info
   out of the dump. Worst-case we get two stacktraces - which
   is not a big deal. Sometimes, if register content is
   corrupted, the precise stack walker in show_regs() wont
   give us a full backtrace - in this case dump_stack() will
   do it.

Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
parent ed680c4a
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