From 78d904b46a72fcf15ea6a39672bbef92953876b5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Steven Rostedt Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 18:43:07 -0500 Subject: ring-buffer: add NMI protection for spinlocks Impact: prevent deadlock in NMI The ring buffers are not yet totally lockless with writing to the buffer. When a writer crosses a page, it grabs a per cpu spinlock to protect against a reader. The spinlocks taken by a writer are not to protect against other writers, since a writer can only write to its own per cpu buffer. The spinlocks protect against readers that can touch any cpu buffer. The writers are made to be reentrant with the spinlocks disabling interrupts. The problem arises when an NMI writes to the buffer, and that write crosses a page boundary. If it grabs a spinlock, it can be racing with another writer (since disabling interrupts does not protect against NMIs) or with a reader on the same CPU. Luckily, most of the users are not reentrant and protects against this issue. But if a user of the ring buffer becomes reentrant (which is what the ring buffers do allow), if the NMI also writes to the ring buffer then we risk the chance of a deadlock. This patch moves the ftrace_nmi_enter called by nmi_enter() to the ring buffer code. It replaces the current ftrace_nmi_enter that is used by arch specific code to arch_ftrace_nmi_enter and updates the Kconfig to handle it. When an NMI is called, it will set a per cpu variable in the ring buffer code and will clear it when the NMI exits. If a write to the ring buffer crosses page boundaries inside an NMI, a trylock is used on the spin lock instead. If the spinlock fails to be acquired, then the entry is discarded. This bug appeared in the ftrace work in the RT tree, where event tracing is reentrant. This workaround solved the deadlocks that appeared there. Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt --- kernel/trace/Kconfig | 8 ++++++++ 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+) (limited to 'kernel/trace/Kconfig') diff --git a/kernel/trace/Kconfig b/kernel/trace/Kconfig index 28f2644484d..25131a5d5e4 100644 --- a/kernel/trace/Kconfig +++ b/kernel/trace/Kconfig @@ -9,6 +9,9 @@ config USER_STACKTRACE_SUPPORT config NOP_TRACER bool +config HAVE_FTRACE_NMI_ENTER + bool + config HAVE_FUNCTION_TRACER bool @@ -37,6 +40,11 @@ config TRACER_MAX_TRACE config RING_BUFFER bool +config FTRACE_NMI_ENTER + bool + depends on HAVE_FTRACE_NMI_ENTER + default y + config TRACING bool select DEBUG_FS -- cgit v1.2.3