tty_buffer: get rid of 'seen_tail' logic in flush_to_ldisc

The flush_to_ldisc() work entry has special logic to notice when it has
seen the original tail of the data queue, and it avoids continuing the
flush if it sees that _original_ tail rather than the current tail.

This logic can trigger in case somebody is constantly adding new data to
the tty while the flushing is active - and the intent is to avoid
excessive CPU usage while flushing the tty, especially as we used to do
this from a softirq context which made it non-preemptible.

However, since we no longer re-arm the work-queue from within itself
(because that causes other trouble: see commit a5660b41af6a "tty: fix
endless work loop when the buffer fills up"), this just leads to
possible hung tty's (most easily seen in SMP and with a test-program
that floods a pty with data - nobody seems to have reported this for any
real-life situation yet).

And since the workqueue isn't done from timers and softirq's any more,
it's doubtful whether the CPU useage issue is really relevant any more.
So just remove the logic entirely, and see if anybody ever notices.

Alternatively, we might want to re-introduce the "re-arm the work" for
just this case, but then we'd have to re-introduce the delayed work
model or some explicit timer, which really doesn't seem worth it for
this.

Reported-and-tested-by: Guillaume Chazarain <guichaz@gmail.com>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Felipe Balbi <balbi@ti.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 12 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c b/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c
index f1a7918d71a..6c9b7cd6778 100644
--- a/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c
+++ b/drivers/tty/tty_buffer.c
@@ -413,8 +413,7 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work)
 	spin_lock_irqsave(&tty->buf.lock, flags);
 
 	if (!test_and_set_bit(TTY_FLUSHING, &tty->flags)) {
-		struct tty_buffer *head, *tail = tty->buf.tail;
-		int seen_tail = 0;
+		struct tty_buffer *head;
 		while ((head = tty->buf.head) != NULL) {
 			int count;
 			char *char_buf;
@@ -424,15 +423,6 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work)
 			if (!count) {
 				if (head->next == NULL)
 					break;
-				/*
-				  There's a possibility tty might get new buffer
-				  added during the unlock window below. We could
-				  end up spinning in here forever hogging the CPU
-				  completely. To avoid this let's have a rest each
-				  time we processed the tail buffer.
-				*/
-				if (tail == head)
-					seen_tail = 1;
 				tty->buf.head = head->next;
 				tty_buffer_free(tty, head);
 				continue;
@@ -442,7 +432,7 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work)
 			   line discipline as we want to empty the queue */
 			if (test_bit(TTY_FLUSHPENDING, &tty->flags))
 				break;
-			if (!tty->receive_room || seen_tail)
+			if (!tty->receive_room)
 				break;
 			if (count > tty->receive_room)
 				count = tty->receive_room;