timers/nohz: Add a comment about broken iowait counter update race
The per-cpu iowait task counter is incremented locally upon sleeping. But since the task can be woken to (and by) another CPU, the counter may then be decremented remotely. This is the source of a race involving readers VS writer of idle/iowait sleeptime. The following scenario shows an example where a /proc/stat reader observes a pending sleep time as IO whereas that pending sleep time later eventually gets accounted as non-IO. CPU 0 CPU 1 CPU 2 ----- ----- ------ //io_schedule() TASK A current->in_iowait = 1 rq(0)->nr_iowait++ //switch to idle // READ /proc/stat // See nr_iowait_cpu(0) == 1 return ts->iowait_sleeptime + ktime_sub(ktime_get(), ts->idle_entrytime) //try_to_wake_up(TASK A) rq(0)->nr_iowait-- //idle exit // See nr_iowait_cpu(0) == 0 ts->idle_sleeptime += ktime_sub(ktime_get(), ts->idle_entrytime) As a result subsequent reads on /proc/stat may expose backward progress. This is unfortunately hardly fixable. Just add a comment about that condition. Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230222144649.624380-5-frederic@kernel.org
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