Since 1.9 with commit b20aa9eef3 ("MAJOR: tasks: create per-thread wait
queues") a task bound to a single thread will not use locks when being
queued or dequeued because the wait queue is assumed to be the owner
thread's.
But there exists a rare situation where this is not true: the health
check tasks may be running on one thread waiting for a response, and
may in parallel be requeued by another thread calling health_adjust()
after a detecting a response error in traffic when "observe l7" is set,
and "fastinter" is lower than "inter", requiring to shorten the running
check's timeout. In this case, the task being requeued was present in
another thread's wait queue, thus opening a race during task_unlink_wq(),
and gets requeued into the calling thread's wait queue instead of the
running one's, opening a second race here.
This patch aims at protecting against the risk of calling task_unlink_wq()
from one thread while the task is queued on another thread, hence unlocked,
by introducing a new TASK_SHARED_WQ flag.
This new flag indicates that a task's position in the wait queue may be
adjusted by other threads than then one currently executing it. This means
that such WQ manipulations must be performed under a lock. There are two
types of such tasks:
- the global ones, using the global wait queue (technically speaking,
those whose thread_mask has at least 2 bits set).
- some local ones, which for now will be placed into the global wait
queue as well in order to benefit from its lock.
The flag is automatically set on initialization if the task's thread mask
indicates more than one thread. The caller must also set it if it intends
to let other threads update the task's expiration delay (e.g. delegated
I/Os), or if it intends to change the task's affinity over time as this
could lead to the same situation.
Right now only the situation described above seems to be affected by this
issue, and it is very difficult to trigger, and even then, will often have
no visible effect beyond stopping the checks for example once the race is
met. On my laptop it is feasible with the following config, chained to
httpterm:
global
maxconn 400 # provoke FD errors, calling health_adjust()
defaults
mode http
timeout client 10s
timeout server 10s
timeout connect 10s
listen px
bind :8001
option httpchk /?t=50
server sback 127.0.0.1:8000 backup
server-template s 0-999 127.0.0.1:8000 check port 8001 inter 100 fastinter 10 observe layer7
This patch will automatically address the case for the checks because
check tasks are created with multiple threads bound and will get the
TASK_SHARED_WQ flag set.
If in the future more tasks need to rely on this (multi-threaded muxes
for example) and the use of the global wait queue becomes a bottleneck
again, then it should not be too difficult to place locks on the local
wait queues and queue the task on its bound thread.
This patch needs to be backported to 2.1, 2.0 and 1.9. It depends on
previous patch "MINOR: task: only check TASK_WOKEN_ANY to decide to
requeue a task".
Many thanks to William Dauchy for providing detailed traces allowing to
spot the problem.
dd0e89a084