workqueue: fix subtle pool management issue which can stall whole worker_pool

workqueue: fix subtle pool management issue which can stall whole worker_pool

A worker_pool's forward progress is guaranteed by the fact that the
last idle worker assumes the manager role to create more workers and
summon the rescuers if creating workers doesn't succeed in timely
manner before proceeding to execute work items.

This manager role is implemented in manage_workers(), which indicates
whether the worker may proceed to work item execution with its return
value.  This is necessary because multiple workers may contend for the
manager role, and, if there already is a manager, others should
proceed to work item execution.

Unfortunately, the function also indicates that the worker may proceed
to work item execution if need_to_create_worker() is false at the head
of the function.  need_to_create_worker() tests the following
conditions.

	pending work items && !nr_running && !nr_idle

The first and third conditions are protected by pool->lock and thus
won't change while holding pool->lock; however, nr_running can change
asynchronously as other workers block and resume and while it's likely
to be zero, as someone woke this worker up in the first place, some
other workers could have become runnable inbetween making it non-zero.

If this happens, manage_worker() could return false even with zero
nr_idle making the worker, the last idle one, proceed to execute work
items.  If then all workers of the pool end up blocking on a resource
which can only be released by a work item which is pending on that
pool, the whole pool can deadlock as there's no one to create more
workers or summon the rescuers.

This patch fixes the problem by removing the early exit condition from
maybe_create_worker() and making manage_workers() return false iff
there's already another manager, which ensures that the last worker
doesn't start executing work items.

We can leave the early exit condition alone and just ignore the return
value but the only reason it was put there is because the
manage_workers() used to perform both creations and destructions of
workers and thus the function may be invoked while the pool is trying
to reduce the number of workers.  Now that manage_workers() is called
only when more workers are needed, the only case this early exit
condition is triggered is rare race conditions rendering it pointless.

Tested with simulated workload and modified workqueue code which
trigger the pool deadlock reliably without this patch.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reported-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sandeen.net>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/g/54B019F4.8030009@sandeen.net
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org