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Brian Behlendorf 436ad60faa Fix kmem cache deadlock logic
The kmem cache implementation always adds new slabs by dispatching a
task to the spl_kmem_cache taskq to perform the allocation.  This is
done because large slabs must be allocated using vmalloc().  It is
possible these allocations will block on IO because the GFP_NOIO flag
is not honored.  This can result in a deadlock.

Therefore, a deadlock detection strategy was implemented to deal with
this case.  When it is determined, by timeout, that the spl_kmem_cache
thread has deadlocked attempting to add a new slab.  Then all callers
attempting to allocate from the cache fall back to using kmalloc()
which does honor all passed flags.

This logic was correct but an optimization in the code allowed for a
deadlock.  Because only slabs backed by vmalloc() can deadlock in the
way described above.  An optimization was made to only invoke this
deadlock detection code for vmalloc() backed caches.  This had the
advantage of making it easy to distinguish these objects when they
were freed.

But this isn't strictly safe.  If all the spl_kmem_cache threads end
up deadlocked than we can't grow any of the other caches either.  This
can once again result in a deadlock if memory needs to be allocated
from one of these other caches to ensure forward progress.

The fix here is to remove the optimization which limits this fall back
allocation stratagy to vmalloc() backed caches.  Doing this means we
may need to take the cache lock in spl_kmem_cache_free() call path.
But this small cost can be mitigated by ignoring objects with virtual
addresses.

For good measure the default number of spl_kmem_cache threads has been
increased from 1 to 4, and made tunable.  This alone wouldn't resolve
the original issue since it's still possible for all the threads to be
deadlocked.  However, it does help responsiveness by ensuring that a
single deadlocked spl_kmem_cache thread doesn't block allocations from
other caches until the timeout is reached.

Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
2015-01-16 13:55:09 -08:00
cmd Retire legacy debugging infrastructure 2014-11-19 10:35:07 -08:00
config Retire legacy debugging infrastructure 2014-11-19 10:35:07 -08:00
include Refine slab cache sizing 2015-01-16 13:55:09 -08:00
lib Remove autotools products 2012-08-27 11:46:23 -07:00
man Refine slab cache sizing 2015-01-16 13:55:09 -08:00
module Fix kmem cache deadlock logic 2015-01-16 13:55:09 -08:00
rpm Tag spl-0.6.3 2014-06-12 11:32:38 -07:00
scripts Retire legacy debugging infrastructure 2014-11-19 10:35:07 -08:00
.gitignore Ignore *.{deb,rpm,tar.gz} files in the top directory. 2013-04-24 16:18:14 -07:00
AUTHORS Refresh AUTHORS 2012-12-19 09:40:18 -08:00
autogen.sh build: do not call boilerplate ourself 2013-04-02 11:08:46 -07:00
configure.ac Document SPL module parameters. 2013-11-21 12:32:41 -08:00
copy-builtin Copy spl.release.in to kernel dir 2013-06-21 15:40:04 -07:00
COPYING Public Release Prep 2010-05-17 15:18:00 -07:00
DISCLAIMER Public Release Prep 2010-05-17 15:18:00 -07:00
Makefile.am Kernel header installation should respect --prefix 2014-10-28 09:31:48 -07:00
META Make license compatibility checks consistent 2014-10-17 15:07:28 -07:00
README.markdown Document how to run SPLAT 2013-10-09 13:52:59 -07:00
spl.release.in Move spl.release generation to configure step 2012-07-12 12:13:47 -07:00

The Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) is a Linux kernel module which provides many of the Solaris kernel APIs. This shim layer makes it possible to run Solaris kernel code in the Linux kernel with relatively minimal modification. This can be particularly useful when you want to track upstream Solaris development closely and do not want the overhead of maintaining a large patch which converts Solaris primitives to Linux primitives.

To build packages for your distribution:

$ ./configure
$ make pkg

If you are building directly from the git tree and not an officially released tarball you will need to generate the configure script. This can be done by executing the autogen.sh script after installing the GNU autotools for your distribution.

To copy the kernel code inside your kernel source tree for builtin compilation:

$ ./configure --enable-linux-builtin --with-linux=/usr/src/linux-...
$ ./copy-builtin /usr/src/linux-...

The SPL comes with an automated test suite called SPLAT. The test suite is implemented in two parts. There is a kernel module which contains the tests and a user space utility which controls which tests are run. To run the full test suite:

$ sudo insmod ./module/splat/splat.ko
$ sudo ./cmd/splat --all

Full documentation for building, configuring, testing, and using the SPL can be found at: http://zfsonlinux.org