Hi Johan,

On 06/10/2021 05:11, Johan Hovold wrote:

Console drivers often queue work while holding locks also taken in 
their
console write paths, something which can lead to deadlocks on SMP when
dumping workqueue state (e.g. sysrq-t or on suspend failures).

For serial console drivers this could look like:

	CPU0				CPU1
	----				----

	show_workqueue_state();
	  lock(&pool->lock);		<IRQ>
	  				  lock(&port->lock);
					  schedule_work();
					    lock(&pool->lock);
	  printk();
	    lock(console_owner);
	    lock(&port->lock);

where workqueues are, for example, used to push data to the line
discipline, process break signals and handle modem-status changes. Line
disciplines and serdev drivers can also queue work on write-wakeup
notifications, etc.

Reworking every console driver to avoid queuing work while holding 
locks
also taken in their write paths would complicate drivers and is neither
desirable or feasible.

Instead use the deferred-printk mechanism to avoid printing while
holding pool locks when dumping workqueue state.

Note that there are a few WARN_ON() assertions in the workqueue code
which could potentially also trigger a deadlock. Hopefully the ongoing
printk rework will provide a general solution for this eventually.

This was originally reported after a lockdep splat when executing
sysrq-t with the imx serial driver.

Fixes: 3494fc30846d ("workqueue: dump workqueues on sysrq-t")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org	# 4.0
Reported-by: Fabio Estevam <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>

With this patch applied, I no longer get the lockdep splat when 
executing
sysrq-t with the imx serial driver, thanks:

Tested-by: Fabio Estevam <redacted>