3f0ea0b864
The workqueue watchdog reports a lockup when there was not any progress
in the worker pool for a long time. The progress means that a pending
work item starts being proceed.
The progress is guaranteed by using idle workers or creating new workers
for pending work items.
There are several reasons why a new worker could not be created:
+ there is not enough memory
+ there is no free pool ID (IDR API)
+ the system reached PID limit
+ the process creating the new worker was interrupted
+ the last idle worker (manager) has not been scheduled for a long
time. It was not able to even start creating the kthread.
None of these failures is reported at the moment. The only clue is that
show_one_worker_pool() prints that there is a manager. It is the last
idle worker that is responsible for creating a new one. But it is not
clear if create_worker() is failing and why.
Make the debugging easier by printing errors in create_worker().
The error code is important, especially from kthread_create_on_node().
It helps to distinguish the various reasons. For example, reaching
memory limit (-ENOMEM), other system limits (-EAGAIN), or process
interrupted (-EINTR).
Use pr_once() to avoid repeating the same error every CREATE_COOLDOWN
for each stuck worker pool.
Ratelimited printk() might be better. It would help to know if the problem
remains. It would be more clear if the create_worker() errors and workqueue
stalls are related. Also old messages might get lost when the internal log
buffer is full. The problem is that printk() might touch the watchdog.
For example, see touch_nmi_watchdog() in serial8250_console_write().
It would require synchronization of the begin and length of the ratelimit
interval with the workqueue watchdog. Otherwise, the error messages
might break the watchdog. This does not look worth the complexity.
Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.