drgn/docs/case_studies/kyber_stack_trace.rst
Omar Sandoval ace4e078a7 docs: replace linux extlink with extension
For an upcoming case study, I want to link to Linux kernel source files
at specific line numbers, and I want it to be formatted as inline code.
The extlinks extension doesn't seem to support that easily, so let's add
our own small extension specifically for Linux kernel code.

Signed-off-by: Omar Sandoval <osandov@osandov.com>
2024-01-11 14:56:13 -08:00

127 lines
5.2 KiB
ReStructuredText

Using Stack Trace Variables to Find a Kyber Bug
===============================================
| Author: Omar Sandoval
| Date: June 9th, 2021
.. highlight:: pycon
Jakub Kicinski reported a crash in the :linuxt:`Kyber I/O scheduler
<block/kyber-iosched.c>` when he was testing Linux 5.12. He captured a core
dump and asked me to debug it. This is a quick writeup of that investigation.
First, we can get the task that crashed::
>>> task = per_cpu(prog["runqueues"], prog["crashing_cpu"]).curr
Then, we can get its stack trace::
>>> trace = prog.stack_trace(task)
>>> trace
#0 queued_spin_lock_slowpath (../kernel/locking/qspinlock.c:471:3)
#1 queued_spin_lock (../include/asm-generic/qspinlock.h:85:2)
#2 do_raw_spin_lock (../kernel/locking/spinlock_debug.c:113:2)
#3 spin_lock (../include/linux/spinlock.h:354:2)
#4 kyber_bio_merge (../block/kyber-iosched.c:573:2)
#5 blk_mq_sched_bio_merge (../block/blk-mq-sched.h:37:9)
#6 blk_mq_submit_bio (../block/blk-mq.c:2182:6)
#7 __submit_bio_noacct_mq (../block/blk-core.c:1015:9)
#8 submit_bio_noacct (../block/blk-core.c:1048:10)
#9 submit_bio (../block/blk-core.c:1125:9)
#10 submit_stripe_bio (../fs/btrfs/volumes.c:6553:2)
#11 btrfs_map_bio (../fs/btrfs/volumes.c:6642:3)
#12 btrfs_submit_data_bio (../fs/btrfs/inode.c:2440:8)
#13 submit_one_bio (../fs/btrfs/extent_io.c:175:9)
#14 submit_extent_page (../fs/btrfs/extent_io.c:3229:10)
#15 __extent_writepage_io (../fs/btrfs/extent_io.c:3793:9)
#16 __extent_writepage (../fs/btrfs/extent_io.c:3872:8)
#17 extent_write_cache_pages (../fs/btrfs/extent_io.c:4514:10)
#18 extent_writepages (../fs/btrfs/extent_io.c:4635:8)
#19 do_writepages (../mm/page-writeback.c:2352:10)
#20 __writeback_single_inode (../fs/fs-writeback.c:1467:8)
#21 writeback_sb_inodes (../fs/fs-writeback.c:1732:3)
#22 __writeback_inodes_wb (../fs/fs-writeback.c:1801:12)
#23 wb_writeback (../fs/fs-writeback.c:1907:15)
#24 wb_check_background_flush (../fs/fs-writeback.c:1975:10)
#25 wb_do_writeback (../fs/fs-writeback.c:2063:11)
#26 wb_workfn (../fs/fs-writeback.c:2091:20)
#27 process_one_work (../kernel/workqueue.c:2275:2)
#28 worker_thread (../kernel/workqueue.c:2421:4)
#29 kthread (../kernel/kthread.c:292:9)
#30 ret_from_fork+0x1f/0x2a (../arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S:294)
It looks like ``kyber_bio_merge()`` tried to lock an invalid spinlock. For
reference, this is the source code of ``kyber_bio_merge()``:
.. code-block:: c
:lineno-start: 563
static bool kyber_bio_merge(struct blk_mq_hw_ctx *hctx, struct bio *bio,
unsigned int nr_segs)
{
struct kyber_hctx_data *khd = hctx->sched_data;
struct blk_mq_ctx *ctx = blk_mq_get_ctx(hctx->queue);
struct kyber_ctx_queue *kcq = &khd->kcqs[ctx->index_hw[hctx->type]];
unsigned int sched_domain = kyber_sched_domain(bio->bi_opf);
struct list_head *rq_list = &kcq->rq_list[sched_domain];
bool merged;
spin_lock(&kcq->lock);
merged = blk_bio_list_merge(hctx->queue, rq_list, bio, nr_segs);
spin_unlock(&kcq->lock);
return merged;
}
When printed, the ``kcq`` structure containing the spinlock indeed looks like
garbage (omitted for brevity).
A crash course on the Linux kernel block layer: for each block device, there is
a "software queue" (``struct blk_mq_ctx *ctx``) for each CPU and a "hardware
queue" (``struct blk_mq_hw_ctx *hctx``) for each I/O queue provided by the
device. Each hardware queue has one or more software queues assigned to it.
Kyber keeps additional data per hardware queue (``struct kyber_hctx_data
*khd``) and per software queue (``struct kyber_ctx_queue *kcq``).
Let's try to figure out where the bad ``kcq`` came from. It should be an
element of the ``khd->kcqs`` array (``khd`` is optimized out, but we can
recover it from ``hctx->sched_data``)::
>>> trace[4]["khd"]
(struct kyber_hctx_data *)<absent>
>>> hctx = trace[4]["hctx"]
>>> khd = cast("struct kyber_hctx_data *", hctx.sched_data)
>>> trace[4]["kcq"] - khd.kcqs
(ptrdiff_t)1
>>> hctx.nr_ctx
(unsigned short)1
So the ``kcq`` is for the second software queue, but the hardware queue is only
supposed to have one software queue. Let's see which CPU was assigned to the
hardware queue::
>>> hctx.ctxs[0].cpu
(unsigned int)6
Here's the problem: we're not running on CPU 6, we're running on CPU 19::
>>> prog["crashing_cpu"]
(int)19
And CPU 19 is assigned to a different hardware queue that actually does have
two software queues::
>>> ctx = per_cpu_ptr(hctx.queue.queue_ctx, 19)
>>> other_hctx = ctx.hctxs[hctx.type]
>>> other_hctx == hctx
False
>>> other_hctx.nr_ctx
(unsigned short)2
The bug is that the caller gets the ``hctx`` for the current CPU, then
``kyber_bio_merge()`` gets the ``ctx`` for the current CPU, and if the thread
is migrated to another CPU in between, they won't match. The fix is to get a
consistent view of the ``hctx`` and ``ctx``. The commit that fixes this is
`here
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=efed9a3337e341bd0989161b97453b52567bc59d>`_.