srcu: Prevent sdp->srcu_gp_seq_needed counter wrap

If a given CPU never happens to ever start an SRCU grace period, the
grace-period sequence counter might wrap.  If this CPU were to decide to
finally start a grace period, the state of its sdp->srcu_gp_seq_needed
might make it appear that it has already requested this grace period,
which would prevent starting the grace period.  If no other CPU ever started
a grace period again, this would look like a grace-period hang.  Even
if some other CPU took pity and started the needed grace period, the
leaf rcu_node structure's ->srcu_data_have_cbs field won't have record
of the fact that this CPU has a callback pending, which would look like
a very localized grace-period hang.

This might seem very unlikely, but SRCU grace periods can take less than
a microsecond on small systems, which means that overflow can happen
in much less than an hour on a 32-bit embedded system.  And embedded
systems are especially likely to have long-term idle CPUs.  Therefore,
it makes sense to prevent this scenario from happening.

This commit therefore scans each srcu_data structure occasionally,
with frequency controlled by the srcutree.counter_wrap_check kernel
boot parameter.  This parameter can be set to something like 255
in order to exercise the counter-wrap-prevention code.

Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index 01b5ab92d251..6671f9b60a86 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -3810,6 +3810,15 @@
 	spia_pedr=
 	spia_peddr=
 
+	srcutree.counter_wrap_check [KNL]
+			Specifies how frequently to check for
+			grace-period sequence counter wrap for the
+			srcu_data structure's ->srcu_gp_seq_needed field.
+			The greater the number of bits set in this kernel
+			parameter, the less frequently counter wrap will
+			be checked for.  Note that the bottom two bits
+			are ignored.
+
 	srcutree.exp_holdoff [KNL]
 			Specifies how many nanoseconds must elapse
 			since the end of the last SRCU grace period for