watchdog: fix watchdog may detect false positive of softlockup
authorLuo Gengkun <luogengkun@huaweicloud.com>
Mon, 21 Apr 2025 03:50:21 +0000 (03:50 +0000)
committerAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Mon, 12 May 2025 00:54:10 +0000 (17:54 -0700)
commit7123dbbef88cfd9f09e8a7899b0911834600cfa3
tree305b8fc01c796bc815c3caddd3f3d9ae9457672a
parent2e27fa943b74c9fc5fdf93090508c3c722531c66
watchdog: fix watchdog may detect false positive of softlockup

When updating `watchdog_thresh`, there is a race condition between writing
the new `watchdog_thresh` value and stopping the old watchdog timer.  If
the old timer triggers during this window, it may falsely detect a
softlockup due to the old interval and the new `watchdog_thresh` value
being used.  The problem can be described as follow:

 # We asuume previous watchdog_thresh is 60, so the watchdog timer is
 # coming every 24s.
echo 10 > /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh (User space)
|
+------>+ update watchdog_thresh (We are in kernel now)
|
|   # using old interval and new `watchdog_thresh`
+------>+ watchdog hrtimer (irq context: detect softlockup)
|
|
+-------+
|
|
+ softlockup_stop_all

To fix this problem, introduce a shadow variable for `watchdog_thresh`.
The update to the actual `watchdog_thresh` is delayed until after the old
timer is stopped, preventing false positives.

The following testcase may help to understand this problem.

---------------------------------------------
echo RT_RUNTIME_SHARE > /sys/kernel/debug/sched/features
echo -1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sched_rt_runtime_us
echo 0 > /sys/kernel/debug/sched/fair_server/cpu3/runtime
echo 60 > /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh
taskset -c 3 chrt -r 99 /bin/bash -c "while true;do true; done" &
echo 10 > /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh &
---------------------------------------------

The test case above first removes the throttling restrictions for
real-time tasks.  It then sets watchdog_thresh to 60 and executes a
real-time task ,a simple while(1) loop, on cpu3.  Consequently, the final
command gets blocked because the presence of this real-time thread
prevents kworker:3 from being selected by the scheduler.  This eventually
triggers a softlockup detection on cpu3 due to watchdog_timer_fn operating
with inconsistent variable - using both the old interval and the updated
watchdog_thresh simultaneously.

[nysal@linux.ibm.com: fix the SOFTLOCKUP_DETECTOR=n case]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250502111120.282690-1-nysal@linux.ibm.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250421035021.3507649-1-luogengkun@huaweicloud.com
Signed-off-by: Luo Gengkun <luogengkun@huaweicloud.com>
Signed-off-by: Nysal Jan K.A. <nysal@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Doug Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>
Cc: Joel Granados <joel.granados@kernel.org>
Cc: Song Liu <song@kernel.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleinxer <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: "Nysal Jan K.A." <nysal@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Venkat Rao Bagalkote <venkat88@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
kernel/watchdog.c