[poll / rfc] kdb_stop_cpus
Nathan Whitehorn
nwhitehorn at freebsd.org
Fri Jun 3 15:54:22 UTC 2011
On 06/03/11 10:13, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>
> I wonder if anybody uses kdb_stop_cpus with non-default value.
> If, yes, I am very interested to learn about your usecase for it.
>
> I think that the default kdb behavior is the correct one, so it doesn't make sense
> to have a knob to turn on incorrect behavior.
> But I may be missing something obvious.
>
> The comment in the code doesn't really satisfy me:
> /*
> * Flag indicating whether or not to IPI the other CPUs to stop them on
> * entering the debugger. Sometimes, this will result in a deadlock as
> * stop_cpus() waits for the other cpus to stop, so we allow it to be
> * disabled. In order to maximize the chances of success, use a hard
> * stop for that.
> */
>
> The hard stop should be sufficiently mighty.
> Yes, I am aware of supposedly extremely rare situations where a deadlock could
> happen even when using hard stop. But I'd rather fix that than have this switch.
>
> Oh, the commit message (from 2004) explains it:
>> Add a new sysctl, debug.kdb.stop_cpus, which controls whether or not we
>> attempt to IPI other cpus when entering the debugger in order to stop
>> them while in the debugger. The default remains to issue the stop;
>> however, that can result in a hang if another cpu has interrupts disabled
>> and is spinning, since the IPI won't be received and the KDB will wait
>> indefinitely. We probably need to add a timeout, but this is a useful
>> stopgap in the mean time.
>
> But that was before we started using hard stop in this context (in 2009).
Some non-x86 platforms (e.g. PPC) don't support real NMIs, and so this
still applies.
-Nathan
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