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Sergey Senozhatsky authored
printk_deferred(), similarly to printk_safe/printk_nmi, does not
immediately attempt to print a new message on the consoles, avoiding
calls into non-reentrant kernel paths, e.g. scheduler or timekeeping,
which potentially can deadlock the system.

Those printk() flavors, instead, rely on per-CPU flush irq_work to print
messages from safer contexts.  For same reasons (recursive scheduler or
timekeeping calls) printk() uses per-CPU irq_work in order to wake up
user space syslog/kmsg readers.

However, only printk_safe/printk_nmi do make sure that per-CPU areas
have been initialised and that it's safe to modify per-CPU irq_work.
This means that, for instance, should printk_deferred() be invoked "too
early", that is before per-CPU areas are initialised, printk_deferred()
will perform illegal per-CPU access.

Lech Perczak [0] reports that after commit 1b710b1b ("char/random:
silence a lockdep splat with printk()") user-space syslog/kmsg readers
are not able to read new kernel messages.

The reason is printk_deferred() being called too early (as was pointed
out by Petr and John).

Fix printk_deferred() and do not queue per-CPU irq_work before per-CPU
areas are initialized.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/aa0732c6-5c4e-8a8b-a1c1-75ebe3dca05b@camlintechnologies.com/


Reported-by: default avatarLech Perczak <l.perczak@camlintechnologies.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarSergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Tested-by: default avatarJann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarPetr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: John Ogness <john.ogness@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
ab6f762f
Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
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In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
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    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
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the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.