The issue addressed by commit fbb934da9 ("BUG/MEDIUM: stick-table: fix
a race condition when updating the expiration task") is still present
when thread groups are enabled, but this time it lies in the scheduler.
What happens is that a task configured to run anywhere might already
have been queued into one group's wait queue. When updating a stick
table entry, sometimes the task will have to be dequeued and requeued.
For this a lock is taken on the current thread group's wait queue lock,
but while this is necessary for the queuing, it's not sufficient for
dequeuing since another thread might be in the process of expiring this
task under its own group's lock which is different. This is easy to test
using 3 stick tables with 1ms expiration, 3 track-sc rules and 4 thread
groups. The process crashes almost instantly under heavy traffic.
One approach could consist in storing the group number the task was
queued under in its descriptor (we don't need 32 bits to store the
thread id, it's possible to use one short for the tid and another
one for the tgrp). Sadly, no safe way to do this was figured, because
the race remains at the moment the thread group number is checked, as
it might be in the process of being changed by another thread. It seems
that a working approach could consist in always having it associated
with one group, and only allowing to change it under this group's lock,
so that any code trying to change it would have to iterately read it
and lock its group until the value matches, confirming it really holds
the correct lock. But this seems a bit complicated, particularly with
wait_expired_tasks() which already uses upgradable locks to switch from
read state to a write state.
Given that the shared tasks are not that common (stick-table expirations,
rate-limited listeners, maybe resolvers), it doesn't seem worth the extra
complexity for now. This patch takes a simpler and safer approach
consisting in switching back to a single wq_lock, but still keeping
separate wait queues. Given that shared wait queues are almost always
empty and that otherwise they're scanned under a read lock, the
contention remains manageable and most of the time the lock doesn't
even need to be taken since such tasks are not present in a group's
queue. In essence, this patch reverts half of the aforementionned
patch. This was tested and confirmed to work fine, without observing
any performance degradation under any workload. The performance with
8 groups on an EPYC 74F3 and 3 tables remains twice the one of a
single group, with the contention remaining on the table's lock first.
No backport is needed.
fc50b9dd14