64db4cfff9
This patch fixes a long-standing performance bug in classic RCU that results in massive internal-to-RCU lock contention on systems with more than a few hundred CPUs. Although this patch creates a separate flavor of RCU for ease of review and patch maintenance, it is intended to replace classic RCU. This patch still handles stress better than does mainline, so I am still calling it ready for inclusion. This patch is against the -tip tree. Nevertheless, experience on an actual 1000+ CPU machine would still be most welcome. Most of the changes noted below were found while creating an rcutiny (which should permit ejecting the current rcuclassic) and while doing detailed line-by-line documentation. Updates from v9 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/2/334): o Fixes from remainder of line-by-line code walkthrough, including comment spelling, initialization, undesirable narrowing due to type conversion, removing redundant memory barriers, removing redundant local-variable initialization, and removing redundant local variables. I do not believe that any of these fixes address the CPU-hotplug issues that Andi Kleen was seeing, but please do give it a whirl in case the machine is smarter than I am. A writeup from the walkthrough may be found at the following URL, in case you are suffering from terminal insomnia or masochism: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/tmp/rcutree-walkthrough.2008.12.16a.pdf o Made rcutree tracing use seq_file, as suggested some time ago by Lai Jiangshan. o Added a .csv variant of the rcudata debugfs trace file, to allow people having thousands of CPUs to drop the data into a spreadsheet. Tested with oocalc and gnumeric. Updated documentation to suit. Updates from v8 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/15/139): o Fix a theoretical race between grace-period initialization and force_quiescent_state() that could occur if more than three jiffies were required to carry out the grace-period initialization. Which it might, if you had enough CPUs. o Apply Ingo's printk-standardization patch. o Substitute local variables for repeated accesses to global variables. o Fix comment misspellings and redundant (but harmless) increments of ->n_rcu_pending (this latter after having explicitly added it). o Apply checkpatch fixes. Updates from v7 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/10/291): o Fixed a number of problems noted by Gautham Shenoy, including the cpu-stall-detection bug that he was having difficulty convincing me was real. ;-) o Changed cpu-stall detection to wait for ten seconds rather than three in order to reduce false positive, as suggested by Ingo Molnar. o Produced a design document (http://lwn.net/Articles/305782/). The act of writing this document uncovered a number of both theoretical and "here and now" bugs as noted below. o Fix dynticks_nesting accounting confusion, simplify WARN_ON() condition, fix kerneldoc comments, and add memory barriers in dynticks interface functions. o Add more data to tracing. o Remove unused "rcu_barrier" field from rcu_data structure. o Count calls to rcu_pending() from scheduling-clock interrupt to use as a surrogate timebase should jiffies stop counting. o Fix a theoretical race between force_quiescent_state() and grace-period initialization. Yes, initialization does have to go on for some jiffies for this race to occur, but given enough CPUs... Updates from v6 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/23/448): o Fix a number of checkpatch.pl complaints. o Apply review comments from Ingo Molnar and Lai Jiangshan on the stall-detection code. o Fix several bugs in !CONFIG_SMP builds. o Fix a misspelled config-parameter name so that RCU now announces at boot time if stall detection is configured. o Run tests on numerous combinations of configurations parameters, which after the fixes above, now build and run correctly. Updates from v5 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/15/92, bad subject line): o Fix a compiler error in the !CONFIG_FANOUT_EXACT case (blew a changeset some time ago, and finally got around to retesting this option). o Fix some tracing bugs in rcupreempt that caused incorrect totals to be printed. o I now test with a more brutal random-selection online/offline script (attached). Probably more brutal than it needs to be on the people reading it as well, but so it goes. o A number of optimizations and usability improvements: o Make rcu_pending() ignore the grace-period timeout when there is no grace period in progress. o Make force_quiescent_state() avoid going for a global lock in the case where there is no grace period in progress. o Rearrange struct fields to improve struct layout. o Make call_rcu() initiate a grace period if RCU was idle, rather than waiting for the next scheduling clock interrupt. o Invoke rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() only when idle, as suggested by Andi Kleen. I still don't completely trust this change, and might back it out. o Make CONFIG_RCU_TRACE be the single config variable manipulated for all forms of RCU, instead of the prior confusion. o Document tracing files and formats for both rcupreempt and rcutree. Updates from v4 for those missing v5 given its bad subject line: o Separated dynticks interface so that NMIs and irqs call separate functions, greatly simplifying it. In particular, this code no longer requires a proof of correctness. ;-) o Separated dynticks state out into its own per-CPU structure, avoiding the duplicated accounting. o The case where a dynticks-idle CPU runs an irq handler that invokes call_rcu() is now correctly handled, forcing that CPU out of dynticks-idle mode. o Review comments have been applied (thank you all!!!). For but one example, fixed the dynticks-ordering issue that Manfred pointed out, saving me much debugging. ;-) o Adjusted rcuclassic and rcupreempt to handle dynticks changes. Attached is an updated patch to Classic RCU that applies a hierarchy, greatly reducing the contention on the top-level lock for large machines. This passes 10-hour concurrent rcutorture and online-offline testing on 128-CPU ppc64 without dynticks enabled, and exposes some timekeeping bugs in presence of dynticks (exciting working on a system where "sleep 1" hangs until interrupted...), which were fixed in the 2.6.27 kernel. It is getting more reliable than mainline by some measures, so the next version will be against -tip for inclusion. See also Manfred Spraul's recent patches (or his earlier work from 2004 at http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=108546384711797&w=2). We will converge onto a common patch in the fullness of time, but are currently exploring different regions of the design space. That said, I have already gratefully stolen quite a few of Manfred's ideas. This patch provides CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, which controls the bushiness of the RCU hierarchy. Defaults to 32 on 32-bit machines and 64 on 64-bit machines. If CONFIG_NR_CPUS is less than CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, there is no hierarchy. By default, the RCU initialization code will adjust CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT to balance the hierarchy, so strongly NUMA architectures may choose to set CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_EXACT to disable this balancing, allowing the hierarchy to be exactly aligned to the underlying hardware. Up to two levels of hierarchy are permitted (in addition to the root node), allowing up to 16,384 CPUs on 32-bit systems and up to 262,144 CPUs on 64-bit systems. I just know that I am going to regret saying this, but this seems more than sufficient for the foreseeable future. (Some architectures might wish to set CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT=4, which would limit such architectures to 64 CPUs. If this becomes a real problem, additional levels can be added, but I doubt that it will make a significant difference on real hardware.) In the common case, a given CPU will manipulate its private rcu_data structure and the rcu_node structure that it shares with its immediate neighbors. This can reduce both lock and memory contention by multiple orders of magnitude, which should eliminate the need for the strange manipulations that are reported to be required when running Linux on very large systems. Some shortcomings: o More bugs will probably surface as a result of an ongoing line-by-line code inspection. Patches will be provided as required. o There are probably hangs, rcutorture failures, &c. Seems quite stable on a 128-CPU machine, but that is kind of small compared to 4096 CPUs. However, seems to do better than mainline. Patches will be provided as required. o The memory footprint of this version is several KB larger than rcuclassic. A separate UP-only rcutiny patch will be provided, which will reduce the memory footprint significantly, even compared to the old rcuclassic. One such patch passes light testing, and has a memory footprint smaller even than rcuclassic. Initial reaction from various embedded guys was "it is not worth it", so am putting it aside. Credits: o Manfred Spraul for ideas, review comments, and bugs spotted, as well as some good friendly competition. ;-) o Josh Triplett, Ingo Molnar, Peter Zijlstra, Mathieu Desnoyers, Lai Jiangshan, Andi Kleen, Andy Whitcroft, and Andrew Morton for reviews and comments. o Thomas Gleixner for much-needed help with some timer issues (see patches below). o Jon M. Tollefson, Tim Pepper, Andrew Theurer, Jose R. Santos, Andy Whitcroft, Darrick Wong, Nishanth Aravamudan, Anton Blanchard, Dave Kleikamp, and Nathan Lynch for keeping machines alive despite my heavy abuse^Wtesting. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> |
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REPORTING-BUGS |
Linux kernel release 2.6.xx <http://kernel.org/> These are the release notes for Linux version 2.6. Read them carefully, as they tell you what this is all about, explain how to install the kernel, and what to do if something goes wrong. WHAT IS LINUX? Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance. It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License - see the accompanying COPYING file for more details. ON WHAT HARDWARE DOES IT RUN? Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher), today Linux also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, Cell, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS, Xtensa, AVR32 and Renesas M32R architectures. Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although functionality is then obviously somewhat limited. Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML). DOCUMENTATION: - There is a lot of documentation available both in electronic form on the Internet and in books, both Linux-specific and pertaining to general UNIX questions. I'd recommend looking into the documentation subdirectories on any Linux FTP site for the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) books. This README is not meant to be documentation on the system: there are much better sources available. - There are various README files in the Documentation/ subdirectory: these typically contain kernel-specific installation notes for some drivers for example. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Changes file, as it contains information about the problems, which may result by upgrading your kernel. - The Documentation/DocBook/ subdirectory contains several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats: PostScript (.ps), PDF, and HTML, among others. After installation, "make psdocs", "make pdfdocs", or "make htmldocs" will render the documentation in the requested format. INSTALLING the kernel: - If you install the full sources, put the kernel tarball in a directory where you have permissions (eg. your home directory) and unpack it: gzip -cd linux-2.6.XX.tar.gz | tar xvf - or bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.XX.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - Replace "XX" with the version number of the latest kernel. Do NOT use the /usr/src/linux area! This area has a (usually incomplete) set of kernel headers that are used by the library header files. They should match the library, and not get messed up by whatever the kernel-du-jour happens to be. - You can also upgrade between 2.6.xx releases by patching. Patches are distributed in the traditional gzip and the newer bzip2 format. To install by patching, get all the newer patch files, enter the top level directory of the kernel source (linux-2.6.xx) and execute: gzip -cd ../patch-2.6.xx.gz | patch -p1 or bzip2 -dc ../patch-2.6.xx.bz2 | patch -p1 (repeat xx for all versions bigger than the version of your current source tree, _in_order_) and you should be ok. You may want to remove the backup files (xxx~ or xxx.orig), and make sure that there are no failed patches (xxx# or xxx.rej). If there are, either you or me has made a mistake. Unlike patches for the 2.6.x kernels, patches for the 2.6.x.y kernels (also known as the -stable kernels) are not incremental but instead apply directly to the base 2.6.x kernel. Please read Documentation/applying-patches.txt for more information. Alternatively, the script patch-kernel can be used to automate this process. It determines the current kernel version and applies any patches found. linux/scripts/patch-kernel linux The first argument in the command above is the location of the kernel source. Patches are applied from the current directory, but an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument. - If you are upgrading between releases using the stable series patches (for example, patch-2.6.xx.y), note that these "dot-releases" are not incremental and must be applied to the 2.6.xx base tree. For example, if your base kernel is 2.6.12 and you want to apply the 2.6.12.3 patch, you do not and indeed must not first apply the 2.6.12.1 and 2.6.12.2 patches. Similarly, if you are running kernel version 2.6.12.2 and want to jump to 2.6.12.3, you must first reverse the 2.6.12.2 patch (that is, patch -R) _before_ applying the 2.6.12.3 patch. You can read more on this in Documentation/applying-patches.txt - Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around: cd linux make mrproper You should now have the sources correctly installed. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS Compiling and running the 2.6.xx kernels requires up-to-date versions of various software packages. Consult Documentation/Changes for the minimum version numbers required and how to get updates for these packages. Beware that using excessively old versions of these packages can cause indirect errors that are very difficult to track down, so don't assume that you can just update packages when obvious problems arise during build or operation. BUILD directory for the kernel: When compiling the kernel all output files will per default be stored together with the kernel source code. Using the option "make O=output/dir" allow you to specify an alternate place for the output files (including .config). Example: kernel source code: /usr/src/linux-2.6.N build directory: /home/name/build/kernel To configure and build the kernel use: cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.N make O=/home/name/build/kernel menuconfig make O=/home/name/build/kernel sudo make O=/home/name/build/kernel modules_install install Please note: If the 'O=output/dir' option is used then it must be used for all invocations of make. CONFIGURING the kernel: Do not skip this step even if you are only upgrading one minor version. New configuration options are added in each release, and odd problems will turn up if the configuration files are not set up as expected. If you want to carry your existing configuration to a new version with minimal work, use "make oldconfig", which will only ask you for the answers to new questions. - Alternate configuration commands are: "make config" Plain text interface. "make menuconfig" Text based color menus, radiolists & dialogs. "make xconfig" X windows (Qt) based configuration tool. "make gconfig" X windows (Gtk) based configuration tool. "make oldconfig" Default all questions based on the contents of your existing ./.config file and asking about new config symbols. "make silentoldconfig" Like above, but avoids cluttering the screen with questions already answered. "make defconfig" Create a ./.config file by using the default symbol values from arch/$ARCH/defconfig. "make allyesconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to 'y' as much as possible. "make allmodconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to 'm' as much as possible. "make allnoconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to 'n' as much as possible. "make randconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol values to random values. The allyesconfig/allmodconfig/allnoconfig/randconfig variants can also use the environment variable KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG to specify a filename that contains config options that the user requires to be set to a specific value. If KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG=filename is not used, "make *config" checks for a file named "all{yes/mod/no/random}.config" for symbol values that are to be forced. If this file is not found, it checks for a file named "all.config" to contain forced values. NOTES on "make config": - having unnecessary drivers will make the kernel bigger, and can under some circumstances lead to problems: probing for a nonexistent controller card may confuse your other controllers - compiling the kernel with "Processor type" set higher than 386 will result in a kernel that does NOT work on a 386. The kernel will detect this on bootup, and give up. - A kernel with math-emulation compiled in will still use the coprocessor if one is present: the math emulation will just never get used in that case. The kernel will be slightly larger, but will work on different machines regardless of whether they have a math coprocessor or not. - the "kernel hacking" configuration details usually result in a bigger or slower kernel (or both), and can even make the kernel less stable by configuring some routines to actively try to break bad code to find kernel problems (kmalloc()). Thus you should probably answer 'n' to the questions for "development", "experimental", or "debugging" features. COMPILING the kernel: - Make sure you have at least gcc 3.2 available. For more information, refer to Documentation/Changes. Please note that you can still run a.out user programs with this kernel. - Do a "make" to create a compressed kernel image. It is also possible to do "make install" if you have lilo installed to suit the kernel makefiles, but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first. To do the actual install you have to be root, but none of the normal build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain. - If you configured any of the parts of the kernel as `modules', you will also have to do "make modules_install". - Keep a backup kernel handy in case something goes wrong. This is especially true for the development releases, since each new release contains new code which has not been debugged. Make sure you keep a backup of the modules corresponding to that kernel, as well. If you are installing a new kernel with the same version number as your working kernel, make a backup of your modules directory before you do a "make modules_install". Alternatively, before compiling, use the kernel config option "LOCALVERSION" to append a unique suffix to the regular kernel version. LOCALVERSION can be set in the "General Setup" menu. - In order to boot your new kernel, you'll need to copy the kernel image (e.g. .../linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage after compilation) to the place where your regular bootable kernel is found. - Booting a kernel directly from a floppy without the assistance of a bootloader such as LILO, is no longer supported. If you boot Linux from the hard drive, chances are you use LILO which uses the kernel image as specified in the file /etc/lilo.conf. The kernel image file is usually /vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz, /bzImage or /boot/bzImage. To use the new kernel, save a copy of the old image and copy the new image over the old one. Then, you MUST RERUN LILO to update the loading map!! If you don't, you won't be able to boot the new kernel image. Reinstalling LILO is usually a matter of running /sbin/lilo. You may wish to edit /etc/lilo.conf to specify an entry for your old kernel image (say, /vmlinux.old) in case the new one does not work. See the LILO docs for more information. After reinstalling LILO, you should be all set. Shutdown the system, reboot, and enjoy! If you ever need to change the default root device, video mode, ramdisk size, etc. in the kernel image, use the 'rdev' program (or alternatively the LILO boot options when appropriate). No need to recompile the kernel to change these parameters. - Reboot with the new kernel and enjoy. IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG: - If you have problems that seem to be due to kernel bugs, please check the file MAINTAINERS to see if there is a particular person associated with the part of the kernel that you are having trouble with. If there isn't anyone listed there, then the second best thing is to mail them to me (torvalds@linux-foundation.org), and possibly to any other relevant mailing-list or to the newsgroup. - In all bug-reports, *please* tell what kernel you are talking about, how to duplicate the problem, and what your setup is (use your common sense). If the problem is new, tell me so, and if the problem is old, please try to tell me when you first noticed it. - If the bug results in a message like unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000010 Oops: 0002 EIP: 0010:XXXXXXXX eax: xxxxxxxx ebx: xxxxxxxx ecx: xxxxxxxx edx: xxxxxxxx esi: xxxxxxxx edi: xxxxxxxx ebp: xxxxxxxx ds: xxxx es: xxxx fs: xxxx gs: xxxx Pid: xx, process nr: xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx or similar kernel debugging information on your screen or in your system log, please duplicate it *exactly*. The dump may look incomprehensible to you, but it does contain information that may help debugging the problem. The text above the dump is also important: it tells something about why the kernel dumped code (in the above example it's due to a bad kernel pointer). More information on making sense of the dump is in Documentation/oops-tracing.txt - If you compiled the kernel with CONFIG_KALLSYMS you can send the dump as is, otherwise you will have to use the "ksymoops" program to make sense of the dump (but compiling with CONFIG_KALLSYMS is usually preferred). This utility can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.<country>.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/ksymoops/ . Alternately you can do the dump lookup by hand: - In debugging dumps like the above, it helps enormously if you can look up what the EIP value means. The hex value as such doesn't help me or anybody else very much: it will depend on your particular kernel setup. What you should do is take the hex value from the EIP line (ignore the "0010:"), and look it up in the kernel namelist to see which kernel function contains the offending address. To find out the kernel function name, you'll need to find the system binary associated with the kernel that exhibited the symptom. This is the file 'linux/vmlinux'. To extract the namelist and match it against the EIP from the kernel crash, do: nm vmlinux | sort | less This will give you a list of kernel addresses sorted in ascending order, from which it is simple to find the function that contains the offending address. Note that the address given by the kernel debugging messages will not necessarily match exactly with the function addresses (in fact, that is very unlikely), so you can't just 'grep' the list: the list will, however, give you the starting point of each kernel function, so by looking for the function that has a starting address lower than the one you are searching for but is followed by a function with a higher address you will find the one you want. In fact, it may be a good idea to include a bit of "context" in your problem report, giving a few lines around the interesting one. If you for some reason cannot do the above (you have a pre-compiled kernel image or similar), telling me as much about your setup as possible will help. Please read the REPORTING-BUGS document for details. - Alternately, you can use gdb on a running kernel. (read-only; i.e. you cannot change values or set break points.) To do this, first compile the kernel with -g; edit arch/i386/Makefile appropriately, then do a "make clean". You'll also need to enable CONFIG_PROC_FS (via "make config"). After you've rebooted with the new kernel, do "gdb vmlinux /proc/kcore". You can now use all the usual gdb commands. The command to look up the point where your system crashed is "l *0xXXXXXXXX". (Replace the XXXes with the EIP value.) gdb'ing a non-running kernel currently fails because gdb (wrongly) disregards the starting offset for which the kernel is compiled.