ntp: Fix leap-second hrtimer livelock
authorJohn Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Tue, 17 Jul 2012 07:05:14 +0000 (03:05 -0400)
committerBen Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
Wed, 25 Jul 2012 03:11:32 +0000 (04:11 +0100)
commita57ccabee60519dd90051266c00d038055b93878
treeb773b7d58cab58a53a6edd143b4aee976e018268
parent9f1e3e0f9fae973747e113848f9a9d0a2e1867f9
ntp: Fix leap-second hrtimer livelock

This is a backport of 6b43ae8a619d17c4935c3320d2ef9e92bdeed05d

This should have been backported when it was commited, but I
mistook the problem as requiring the ntp_lock changes
that landed in 3.4 in order for it to occur.

Unfortunately the same issue can happen (with only one cpu)
as follows:
do_adjtimex()
 write_seqlock_irq(&xtime_lock);
  process_adjtimex_modes()
   process_adj_status()
    ntp_start_leap_timer()
     hrtimer_start()
      hrtimer_reprogram()
       tick_program_event()
        clockevents_program_event()
         ktime_get()
          seq = req_seqbegin(xtime_lock); [DEADLOCK]

This deadlock will no always occur, as it requires the
leap_timer to force a hrtimer_reprogram which only happens
if its set and there's no sooner timer to expire.

NOTE: This patch, being faithful to the original commit,
introduces a bug (we don't update wall_to_monotonic),
which will be resovled by backporting a following fix.

Original commit message below:

Since commit 7dffa3c673fbcf835cd7be80bb4aec8ad3f51168 the ntp
subsystem has used an hrtimer for triggering the leapsecond
adjustment. However, this can cause a potential livelock.

Thomas diagnosed this as the following pattern:
CPU 0                                                    CPU 1
do_adjtimex()
  spin_lock_irq(&ntp_lock);
    process_adjtimex_modes();  timer_interrupt()
      process_adj_status();                                do_timer()
        ntp_start_leap_timer();                             write_lock(&xtime_lock);
          hrtimer_start();                                  update_wall_time();
             hrtimer_reprogram();                            ntp_tick_length()
               tick_program_event()                            spin_lock(&ntp_lock);
                 clockevents_program_event()
   ktime_get()
                     seq = req_seqbegin(xtime_lock);

This patch tries to avoid the problem by reverting back to not using
an hrtimer to inject leapseconds, and instead we handle the leapsecond
processing in the second_overflow() function.

The downside to this change is that on systems that support highres
timers, the leap second processing will occur on a HZ tick boundary,
(ie: ~1-10ms, depending on HZ)  after the leap second instead of
possibly sooner (~34us in my tests w/ x86_64 lapic).

This patch applies on top of tip/timers/core.

CC: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com>
CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reported-by: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com>
Diagnoised-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Tested-by: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com>
Cc: Prarit Bhargava <prarit@redhat.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
include/linux/timex.h
kernel/time/ntp.c
kernel/time/timekeeping.c