On 20/07/2021 15:53, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 3:25 AM Tvrtko Ursulin tvrtko.ursulin@linux.intel.com wrote:
On 19/07/2021 19:30, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
If the driver was not fully loaded, we may still have globals lying around. If we don't tear those down in i915_exit(), we'll leak a bunch of memory slabs. This can happen two ways: use_kms = false and if we've run mock selftests. In either case, we have an early exit from i915_init which happens after i915_globals_init() and we need to clean up those globals. While we're here, add an explicit boolean instead of using a random field from i915_pci_device to detect partial loads.
The mock selftests case gets especially sticky. The load isn't entirely a no-op. We actually do quite a bit inside those selftests including allocating a bunch of mock objects and running tests on them. Once all those tests are complete, we exit early from i915_init(). Perviously, i915_init() would return a non-zero error code on failure and a zero error code on success. In the success case, we would get to i915_exit() and check i915_pci_driver.driver.owner to detect if i915_init exited early and do nothing. In the failure case, we would fail i915_init() but there would be no opportunity to clean up globals.
The most annoying part is that you don't actually notice the failure as part of the self-tests since leaking a bit of memory, while bad, doesn't result in anything observable from userspace. Instead, the next time we load the driver (usually for next IGT test), i915_globals_init() gets invoked again, we go to allocate a bunch of new memory slabs, those implicitly create debugfs entries, and debugfs warns that we're trying to create directories and files that already exist. Since this all happens as part of the next driver load, it shows up in the dmesg-warn of whatever IGT test ran after the mock selftests.
Story checks out but I totally don't get why it wouldn't be noticed until now. Was it perhaps part of the selfetsts contract that a reboot is required after failure?
No. They do unload the driver, though. They just don't re-load it.
I guess that does mean behaviour is reboot after first selftests failure, which would explain why it wasn't caught until now. I was running selftests and I know why I did not see it but that shall not be mentioned here. :)
While the obvious thing to do here might be to call i915_globals_exit() after selftests, that's not actually safe. The dma-buf selftests call i915_gem_prime_export which creates a file. We call dma_buf_put() on the resulting dmabuf which calls fput() on the file. However, fput() isn't immediate and gets flushed right before syscall returns. This means that all the fput()s from the selftests don't happen until right before the module load syscall used to fire off the selftests returns which is after i915_init(). If we call i915_globals_exit() in i915_init() after selftests, we end up freeing slabs out from under objects which won't get released until fput() is flushed at the end of the module load.
Nasty. Wasn't visible while globals memory leak was "in place". :I
The solution here is to let i915_init() return success early and detect the early success in i915_exit() and only tear down globals and nothing else. This way the module loads successfully, regardless of the success or failure of the tests. Because we've not enumerated any PCI devices, no device nodes are created and it's entirely useless from userspace. The only thing the module does at that point is hold on to a bit of memory until we unload it and i915_exit() is called. Importantly, this means that everything from our selftests has the ability to properly flush out between i915_init() and i915_exit() because there are a couple syscall boundaries in between.
When you say "couple of syscall boundaries" you mean exactly two (module init/unload) or there is more to it? Like why "couple" is needed and not just that the module load syscall has exited? That part sounds potentially dodgy. What mechanism is used by the delayed flush?
Have you checked how this change interacts with the test runner and CI?
By the end of the series, a bunch of tests are fixed. In particular, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/3746
Wait but that means CI does reload the driver. So again I totally don't understand why this is only popping up now.
Regards,
Tvrtko