When we get a notification that cpu topology changed, we schedule a
work struct which just calls arch_reinit_sched_domains. This function
in turn calls get_online_cpus() which results int the lockdep warning
below.
After all it turnded out that it's not legal to call get_online_cpus()
from the context of a multi-threaded work queue.
It could deadlock this way:
process 0 (events/cpu-x):
-> run_workqueue
-> removes my work_struct from the work queue
-> calls work_struct->fn
-> get_online_cpus()
-> locks on cpu_hotplug.lock since process 1 below is doing cpu hotplug
process 1:
-> cpu_down (for cpu-x)
-> cpu_hotplug_begin (holds cpu_hotplug.lock now)
-> cpu-x dead
-> notifier_call_chain with CPU_DEAD
-> cleanup_workqueue_thread
-> flush_cpu_workqueue (succeeds)
-> kthread_stop for events/cpu-x
-> now kthread_stop waits for my work_struct to complete from within
process 0. -> dead.
A single threaded workqueue wouldn't have such problems, however there is
no such common queue available and it's not worth to create one for the
very rare calls to arch_reinit_sched_domains.
So we just create a kernel thread from our work struct which calls
arch_reinit_sched_domains and are done with it.
Thanks to Oleg Nesterov and Peter Zijlstra for helping me figuring out
that this isn't a false positive lockdep warning:
=======================================================
[ INFO: possible circular locking dependency detected ] 2.6.25-03562-g3dc5063-dirty #12
-------------------------------------------------------
events/3/14 is trying to acquire lock:
(&cpu_hotplug.lock){--..}, at: [<0000000000076094>] get_online_cpus+0x50/0x78
but task is already holding lock:
(topology_work){--..}, at: [<0000000000059cde>] run_workqueue+0x106/0x278
which lock already depends on the new lock.
the existing dependency chain (in reverse order) is: