On Wed, 7 Dec 2016 10:10:40 +0100
Sebastian Andrzej Siewior [off-list ref] wrote:

On 2016-12-06 17:50:30 [-0500], Steven Rostedt wrote:

quoted

A customer hit a crash where the napi sd->poll_list became corrupted.
The customer had the bnx2x driver, which does a
__napi_schedule_irqoff() in its interrupt handler. Unfortunately, when
running with CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT_FULL, this interrupt handler is run as a
thread and is preemptable. The call to ____napi_schedule() must be done
with interrupts disabled to protect the per cpu softnet_data's
poll_list, which is protected by disabling interrupts (disabling
preemption is enough when all interrupts are threaded and
local_bh_disable() can't preempt).

As bnx2x isn't the only driver that does this, the safest thing to do
is to make __napi_schedule_irqoff() call __napi_schedule() instead when
CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT_FULL is enabled, which will call local_irq_save()
before calling ____napi_schedule().  

It would work RT wise. But don't have the same problem if you boot the
kernel with threadirqs ?

I thought the same at first, but looking into the code for forced
threaded interrupts, I saw this:

        local_bh_disable();
        ret = action->thread_fn(action->irq, action->dev_id);
        irq_finalize_oneshot(desc, action);
        local_bh_enable();

Where without CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT_FULL, local_bh_disable() also disables
preemption. Then all the handlers still can not be preempted by another
handler. So it appears to be safe as well.

-- Steve