Oops on Power8 (was Re: [PATCH v2 1/7] workqueue: make workqueue available early during boot)

[Michael Ellerman]

Tejun Heo <tj at kernel.org> writes:

> Hello, Michael.
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 10:22:13PM +1100, Michael Ellerman wrote:
>> The oops happens because we're in enqueue_task_fair() and p->se->cfs_rq
>> is NULL.
>> 
>> The cfs_rq is NULL because we did set_task_rq(p, 2048), where 2048 is
>> NR_CPUS. That causes us to index past the end of the tg->cfs_rq array in
>> set_task_rq() and happen to get NULL.
>> 
>> We never should have done set_task_rq(p, 2048), because 2048 is >=
>> nr_cpu_ids, which means it's not a valid CPU number, and set_task_rq()
>> doesn't cope with that.
>
> Hmm... it doesn't reproduce it here and can't see how the commit would
> affect this given that it doesn't really change when the kworker
> kthreads are being created.

It changes when the pool attributes are created, which is the source of
the bug.

The original crash happens because we have a task with an empty cpus_allowed
mask. That mask originally comes from pool->attrs->cpumask.

The attrs for the pool are created early via workqueue_init_early() in
apply_wqattrs_prepare():

  start_here_common
  -> start_kernel
     -> workqueue_init_early
        -> __alloc_workqueue_key
           -> apply_workqueue_attrs
              -> apply_workqueue_attrs_locked
                 -> apply_wqattrs_prepare
	          
In there we do:

	copy_workqueue_attrs(new_attrs, attrs);
	cpumask_and(new_attrs->cpumask, new_attrs->cpumask, wq_unbound_cpumask);
	if (unlikely(cpumask_empty(new_attrs->cpumask)))
		cpumask_copy(new_attrs->cpumask, wq_unbound_cpumask);
	...
	copy_workqueue_attrs(tmp_attrs, new_attrs);
	...
	for_each_node(node) {
		if (wq_calc_node_cpumask(new_attrs, node, -1, tmp_attrs->cpumask)) {
+			BUG_ON(cpumask_empty(tmp_attrs->cpumask));
			ctx->pwq_tbl[node] = alloc_unbound_pwq(wq, tmp_attrs);


The bad case (where we hit the BUG_ON I added above) is where we are
creating a wq for node 1.

In wq_calc_node_cpumask() we do:

	cpumask_and(cpumask, attrs->cpumask, wq_numa_possible_cpumask[node]);
	return !cpumask_equal(cpumask, attrs->cpumask);

Which with the arguments inserted is:

	cpumask_and(tmp_attrs->cpumask, new_attrs->cpumask, wq_numa_possible_cpumask[1]);
	return !cpumask_equal(tmp_attrs->cpumask, new_attrs->cpumask);

And that results in tmp_attrs->cpumask being empty, because
wq_numa_possible_cpumask[1] is an empty cpumask.

The reason wq_numa_possible_cpumask[1] is an empty mask is because in
wq_numa_init() we did:

	for_each_possible_cpu(cpu) {
		node = cpu_to_node(cpu);
		if (WARN_ON(node == NUMA_NO_NODE)) {
			pr_warn("workqueue: NUMA node mapping not available for cpu%d, disabling NUMA support\n", cpu);
			/* happens iff arch is bonkers, let's just proceed */
			return;
		}
		cpumask_set_cpu(cpu, tbl[node]);
	}

And cpu_to_node() returned node 0 for every CPU in the system, despite there
being multiple nodes.

That happened because we haven't yet called set_cpu_numa_node() for the non-boot
cpus, because that happens in smp_prepare_cpus(), and
workqueue_init_early() is called much earlier than that.

This doesn't trigger on x86 because it does set_cpu_numa_node() in
setup_per_cpu_areas(), which is called prior to workqueue_init_early().

We can (should) probably do the same on powerpc, I'll look at that
tomorrow. But other arches may have a similar problem, and at the very
least we need to document that workqueue_init_early() relies on
cpu_to_node() working.

cheers