rqspinlock: Disable queue destruction for deadlocks
Disable propagation and unwinding of the waiter queue in case the head
waiter detects a deadlock condition, but keep it enabled in case of the
timeout fallback.
Currently, when the head waiter experiences an AA deadlock, it will
signal all its successors in the queue to exit with an error. This is
not ideal for cases where the same lock is held in contexts which can
cause errors in an unrestricted fashion (e.g., BPF programs, or kernel
paths invoked through BPF programs), and core kernel logic which is
written in a correct fashion and does not expect deadlocks.
The same reasoning can be extended to ABBA situations. Depending on the
actual runtime schedule, one or both of the head waiters involved in an
ABBA situation can detect and exit directly without terminating their
waiter queue. If the ABBA situation manifests again, the waiters will
keep exiting until progress can be made, or a timeout is triggered in
case of more complicated locking dependencies.
We still preserve the queue destruction in case of timeouts, as either
the locking dependencies are too complex to be captured by AA and ABBA
heuristics, or the owner is perpetually stuck. As such, it would be
unwise to continue to apply the timeout for each new head waiter without
terminating the queue, since we may end up waiting for more than 250 ms
in aggregate with all participants in the locking transaction.
The patch itself is fairly simple; we can simply signal our successor to
become the next head waiter, and leave the queue without attempting to
acquire the lock.
With this change, the behavior for waiters in case of deadlocks
experienced by a predecessor changes. It is guaranteed that call sites
will no longer receive errors if the predecessors encounter deadlocks
and the successors do not participate in one. This should lower the
failure rate for waiters that are not doing improper locking opreations,
just because they were unlucky to queue behind a misbehaving waiter.
However, timeouts are still a possibility, hence they must be accounted
for, so users cannot rely upon errors not occuring at all.
Suggested-by: Amery Hung <ameryhung@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi <memxor@gmail.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20251029181828.231529-2-memxor@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
1 file changed
