watchdog: update watchdog_thresh properly

watchdog_tresh controls how often nmi perf event counter checks per-cpu
hrtimer_interrupts counter and blows up if the counter hasn't changed
since the last check.  The counter is updated by per-cpu
watchdog_hrtimer hrtimer which is scheduled with 2/5 watchdog_thresh
period which guarantees that hrtimer is scheduled 2 times per the main
period.  Both hrtimer and perf event are started together when the
watchdog is enabled.

So far so good.  But...

But what happens when watchdog_thresh is updated from sysctl handler?

proc_dowatchdog will set a new sampling period and hrtimer callback
(watchdog_timer_fn) will use the new value in the next round.  The
problem, however, is that nobody tells the perf event that the sampling
period has changed so it is ticking with the period configured when it
has been set up.

This might result in an ear ripping dissonance between perf and hrtimer
parts if the watchdog_thresh is increased.  And even worse it might lead
to KABOOM if the watchdog is configured to panic on such a spurious
lockup.

This patch fixes the issue by updating both nmi perf even counter and
hrtimers if the threshold value has changed.

The nmi one is disabled and then reinitialized from scratch.  This has
an unpleasant side effect that the allocation of the new event might
fail theoretically so the hard lockup detector would be disabled for
such cpus.  On the other hand such a memory allocation failure is very
unlikely because the original event is deallocated right before.

It would be much nicer if we just changed perf event period but there
doesn't seem to be any API to do that right now.  It is also unfortunate
that perf_event_alloc uses GFP_KERNEL allocation unconditionally so we
cannot use on_each_cpu() and do the same thing from the per-cpu context.
The update from the current CPU should be safe because
perf_event_disable removes the event atomically before it clears the
per-cpu watchdog_ev so it cannot change anything under running handler
feet.

The hrtimer is simply restarted (thanks to Don Zickus who has pointed
this out) if it is queued because we cannot rely it will fire&adopt to
the new sampling period before a new nmi event triggers (when the
treshold is decreased).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: the UP version of __smp_call_function_single ended up in the wrong place]
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Fabio Estevam <festevam@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions