When we split a BMBT due to record insertion, we offload it to a
worker thread because we can be deep in the stack when we try to
allocate a new block for the BMBT. Allocation can use several
kilobytes of stack (full memory reclaim, swap and/or IO path can
end up on the stack during allocation) and we can already be several
kilobytes deep in the stack when we need to split the BMBT.
A recent workload demonstrated a deadlock in this BMBT split
offload. It requires several things to happen at once:
1. two inodes need a BMBT split at the same time, one must be
unwritten extent conversion from IO completion, the other must be
from extent allocation.
2. there must be a no available xfs_alloc_wq worker threads
available in the worker pool.
3. There must be sustained severe memory shortages such that new
kworker threads cannot be allocated to the xfs_alloc_wq pool for
both threads that need split work to be run
4. The split work from the unwritten extent conversion must run
first.
5. when the BMBT block allocation runs from the split work, it must
loop over all AGs and not be able to either trylock an AGF
successfully, or each AGF is is able to lock has no space available
for a single block allocation.
6. The BMBT allocation must then attempt to lock the AGF that the
second task queued to the rescuer thread already has locked before
it finds an AGF it can allocate from.
At this point, we have an ABBA deadlock between tasks queued on the
xfs_alloc_wq rescuer thread and a locked AGF. i.e. The queued task
holding the AGF lock can't be run by the rescuer thread until the
task the rescuer thread is runing gets the AGF lock....
This is a highly improbably series of events, but there it is.
There's a couple of ways to fix this, but the easiest way to ensure
that we only punt tasks with a locked AGF that holds enough space
for the BMBT block allocations to the worker thread.
This works for unwritten extent conversion in IO completion (which
doesn't have a locked AGF and space reservations) because we have
tight control over the IO completion stack. It is typically only 6
functions deep when xfs_btree_split() is called because we've
already offloaded the IO completion work to a worker thread and
hence we don't need to worry about stack overruns here.
The other place we can be called for a BMBT split without a
preceeding allocation is __xfs_bunmapi() when punching out the
center of an existing extent. We don't remove extents in the IO
path, so these operations don't tend to be called with a lot of
stack consumed. Hence we don't really need to ship the split off to
a worker thread in these cases, either.
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
c85007e2e3