rcu: Update stall-warning documentation
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/RCU/stallwarn.txt b/Documentation/RCU/stallwarn.txt
index 8e9359d..6f3a005 100644
--- a/Documentation/RCU/stallwarn.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RCU/stallwarn.txt
@@ -12,12 +12,12 @@
This kernel configuration parameter defines the period of time
that RCU will wait from the beginning of a grace period until it
issues an RCU CPU stall warning. This time period is normally
- sixty seconds.
+ 21 seconds.
This configuration parameter may be changed at runtime via the
/sys/module/rcutree/parameters/rcu_cpu_stall_timeout, however
this parameter is checked only at the beginning of a cycle.
- So if you are 30 seconds into a 70-second stall, setting this
+ So if you are 10 seconds into a 40-second stall, setting this
sysfs parameter to (say) five will shorten the timeout for the
-next- stall, or the following warning for the current stall
(assuming the stall lasts long enough). It will not affect the
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
also dump the stacks of any tasks that are blocking the current
RCU-preempt grace period.
-RCU_CPU_STALL_INFO
+CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_INFO
This kernel configuration parameter causes the stall warning to
print out additional per-CPU diagnostic information, including
@@ -43,7 +43,8 @@
Although the lockdep facility is extremely useful, it does add
some overhead. Therefore, under CONFIG_PROVE_RCU, the
RCU_STALL_DELAY_DELTA macro allows five extra seconds before
- giving an RCU CPU stall warning message.
+ giving an RCU CPU stall warning message. (This is a cpp
+ macro, not a kernel configuration parameter.)
RCU_STALL_RAT_DELAY
@@ -52,7 +53,8 @@
However, if the offending CPU does not detect its own stall in
the number of jiffies specified by RCU_STALL_RAT_DELAY, then
some other CPU will complain. This delay is normally set to
- two jiffies.
+ two jiffies. (This is a cpp macro, not a kernel configuration
+ parameter.)
When a CPU detects that it is stalling, it will print a message similar
to the following:
@@ -86,7 +88,12 @@
INFO: rcu_bh_state detected stalls on CPUs/tasks: { } (detected by 4, 2502 jiffies)
-This is rare, but does happen from time to time in real life.
+This is rare, but does happen from time to time in real life. It is also
+possible for a zero-jiffy stall to be flagged in this case, depending
+on how the stall warning and the grace-period initialization happen to
+interact. Please note that it is not possible to entirely eliminate this
+sort of false positive without resorting to things like stop_machine(),
+which is overkill for this sort of problem.
If the CONFIG_RCU_CPU_STALL_INFO kernel configuration parameter is set,
more information is printed with the stall-warning message, for example:
@@ -216,4 +223,5 @@
If you can reliably trigger the stall, ftrace can be quite helpful.
RCU bugs can often be debugged with the help of CONFIG_RCU_TRACE
-and with RCU's event tracing.
+and with RCU's event tracing. For information on RCU's event tracing,
+see include/trace/events/rcu.h.