Re: [PATCH 0/5] s390/pci: automatic error recovery
From: Niklas Schnelle <schnelle@linux.ibm.com>
Date: 2021-09-08 08:09:46
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linux-s390, lkml
On Wed, 2021-09-08 at 11:37 +1000, Oliver O'Halloran wrote:
On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 10:21 PM Niklas Schnelle [off-list ref] wrote:quoted
On Tue, 2021-09-07 at 10:45 +0200, Niklas Schnelle wrote:quoted
On Tue, 2021-09-07 at 12:04 +1000, Oliver O'Halloran wrote:quoted
On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 7:49 PM Niklas Schnelle [off-list ref] wrote:quoted
Patch 3 I already sent separately resulting in the discussion below but without a final conclusion. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210720150145.640727-1-schnelle@linux.ibm.com/ (local) I believe even though there were some doubts about the use of pci_dev_is_added() by arch code the existing uses as well as the use in the final patch of this series warrant this export.The use of pci_dev_is_added() in arch/powerpc was because in the past pci_bus_add_device() could be called before pci_device_add(). That was fixed a while ago so It should be safe to remove those calls now.Hmm, ok that confirms Bjorns suspicion and explains how it came to be. I can certainly sent a patch for that. This would then leave only the existing use in s390 which I added because of a dead lock prevention and explained here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87d15d5eead35c9eaa667958d057cf4a81a8bf13.camel@linux.ibm.com/ (local) Plus the need to use it in the recovery code of this series. I think in the EEH code the need for a similar check is alleviated by the checks in the beginning of arch/powerpc/kernel/eeh_driver.c:eeh_handle_normal_event() especially eeh_slot_presence_check() which checks presence via the hotplug slot. I guess we could use our own state tracking in a similar way but felt like pci_dev_is_added() is the more logical choice.The slot check is mainly there to prevent attempts to "recover" devices that have been surprise removed (i.e NVMe hot-unplug). The actual recovery process operates off the eeh_pe tree which is frozen in place when an error is detected. If a pci_dev is added or removed it's not really a problem since those are only ever looked at when notifying drivers which is done with the rescan_remove lock held.
Thanks for the explanation.
That said, I wouldn't really encourage anyone to follow the EEH model since it's pretty byzantine.quoted
Looking into this again, I think we actually can't easily track this state ourselves outside struct pci_dev. The reason for this is that when e.g. arch/s390/pci/pci_sysfs.c:recover_store() removes the struct pci_dev and scans it again the new struct pci_dev re-uses the same struct zpci_dev because from a platform point of view the PCI device was never removed but only disabled and re-enabled. Thus we can only distinguish the stale struct pci_dev by looking at things stored in struct pci_dev itself.IMO the real problem is removing and re-adding the pci_dev. I think it's something that's done largely because the PCI core doesn't really provide any better mechanism for getting a device back into a known-good state so it's abused to implement error recovery. This is something that's always annoyed me since it conflates recovery with hotplug. After a hot-(un)plug we might have a different device or no device. In the recovery case we expect to start and end with the same device. Why not apply the same logic to the pci_dev?
For us there are two cases. First The existing /sys/bus/pci/devices/<dev>/recover attribute. This does the pci_dev remove and re-add that you mention and thus we end up with a ne pci_dev afterwards and I agree that is kind of a dumb way to recover which (too?) closely resembles unplug/re-plug. Secondly the automatic error recovery added in this series. Here we only attempt recovery if we have a driver bound that supports the error callbacks thus always keeping the same pci_dev. If there is no driver we give up automatic recovery and are back at the situation without this series.
Something I was tinkering with before I left IBM was re-working the way EEH handles recovering devices that don't have a driver with error handling callbacks to something like: 1. unbind the driver 2. pci_save_state() 3. do the reset 4. pci_restore_state() 5. re-bind the driver That would allow keeping the pci_dev around and let me delete a pile of confusing code which handles binding the eeh_dev to the new pci_dev.
This sounds like an interesting future approach for us too. Thankfully our binding of the zpci_dev to the new pci_dev is pretty simple by now. The main trouble with removing and re-adding a pci_dev is then that upper layers like block devices are also re-created which really only happens if we have a driver bound.
The obvious problem with that approach is the assumption the device is functional enough to allow saving the config space, but I don't think that's a deal breaker. We could stash a copy of the device state before we allow drivers to attach and use that to restore the device after the reset. The end result would be the same known-good state that we'd get after a re-scan.quoted
That said, I think for the recovery case we might be able to drop the pci_dev_is_added() and rely on pdev->driver != NULL which we check anyway and that should catch any PCI device that was already removed.Would that work if there was an error on a device without a driver bound?
For the automatic recovery flow introduced by this series we only recover if such a driver is bound anyway so that is already a requirement. Luckily all physical PCI devices we support on our platform have drivers with that support.
If you're just trying to stop races between recovery and device removal then pci_dev_is_added() is probably the right tool for the job. Trying to substitute it with a proxy seems like a bad idea.
Yes I believe at least for the existing recover attribute that does not require a bound driver we still need pci_dev_is_added(). For the automatic recovery flow I think it would be okay to rely on the fact that removed devices don't have a driver bound since the recovery requires a bound driver anyway but yes an explicit pci_dev_is_added() check as in this patch does feel more clean.