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Do 'make oldconfig' and accept all the defaults for new config options - reboot into the kernel and if everything goes well it should boot up fine and you should have /proc/lockdep and /proc/lockdep_stats files. Typically if the lock validator finds some problem it will print out voluminous debug output that begins with "BUG: ..." and which syslog output can be used by kernel developers to figure out the precise locking scenario. What does the lock validator do? It "observes" and maps all locking rules as they occur dynamically (as triggered by the kernel's natural use of spinlocks, rwlocks, mutexes and rwsems). Whenever the lock validator subsystem detects a new locking scenario, it validates this new rule against the existing set of rules. If this new rule is consistent with the existing set of rules then the new rule is added transparently and the kernel continues as normal. If the new rule could create a deadlock scenario then this condition is printed out. When determining validity of locking, all possible "deadlock scenarios" are considered: assuming arbitrary number of CPUs, arbitrary irq context and task context constellations, running arbitrary combinations of all the existing locking scenarios. In a typical system this means millions of separate scenarios. This is why we call it a "locking correctness" validator - for all rules that are observed the lock validator proves it with mathematical certainty that a deadlock could not occur (assuming that the lock validator implementation itself is correct and its internal data structures are not corrupted by some other kernel subsystem). [see more details and conditionals of this statement in include/linux/lockdep.h and Documentation/lockdep-design.txt] Furthermore, this "all possible scenarios" property of the validator also enables the finding of complex, highly unlikely multi-CPU multi-context races via single single-context rules, increasing the likelyhood of finding bugs drastically. In practical terms: the lock validator already found a bug in the upstream kernel that could only occur on systems with 3 or more CPUs, and which needed 3 very unlikely code sequences to occur at once on the 3 CPUs. That bug was found and reported on a single-CPU system (!). So in essence a race will be found "piecemail-wise", triggering all the necessary components for the race, without having to reproduce the race scenario itself! In its short existence the lock validator found and reported many bugs before they actually caused a real deadlock. To further increase the efficiency of the validator, the mapping is not per "lock instance", but per "lock-class". For example, all struct inode objects in the kernel have inode->inotify_mutex. If there are 10,000 inodes cached, then there are 10,000 lock objects. But ->inotify_mutex is a single "lock type", and all locking activities that occur against ->inotify_mutex are "unified" into this single lock-class. The advantage of the lock-class approach is that all historical ->inotify_mutex uses are mapped into a single (and as narrow as possible) set of locking rules - regardless of how many different tasks or inode structures it took to build this set of rules. The set of rules persist during the lifetime of the kernel. To see the rough magnitude of checking that the lock validator does, here's a portion of /proc/lockdep_stats, fresh after bootup: lock-classes: 694 [max: 2048] direct dependencies: 1598 [max: 8192] indirect dependencies: 17896 all direct dependencies: 16206 dependency chains: 1910 [max: 8192] in-hardirq chains: 17 in-softirq chains: 105 in-process chains: 1065 stack-trace entries: 38761 [max: 131072] combined max dependencies: |
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| .. | ||
| irq | ||
| power | ||
| time | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| acct.c | ||
| audit.c | ||
| audit.h | ||
| auditfilter.c | ||
| auditsc.c | ||
| capability.c | ||
| compat.c | ||
| configs.c | ||
| cpu.c | ||
| cpuset.c | ||
| dma.c | ||
| exec_domain.c | ||
| exit.c | ||
| extable.c | ||
| fork.c | ||
| futex.c | ||
| futex_compat.c | ||
| hrtimer.c | ||
| itimer.c | ||
| kallsyms.c | ||
| Kconfig.hz | ||
| Kconfig.preempt | ||
| kexec.c | ||
| kfifo.c | ||
| kmod.c | ||
| kprobes.c | ||
| ksysfs.c | ||
| kthread.c | ||
| lockdep.c | ||
| lockdep_internals.h | ||
| Makefile | ||
| module.c | ||
| mutex-debug.c | ||
| mutex-debug.h | ||
| mutex.c | ||
| mutex.h | ||
| panic.c | ||
| params.c | ||
| pid.c | ||
| posix-cpu-timers.c | ||
| posix-timers.c | ||
| printk.c | ||
| profile.c | ||
| ptrace.c | ||
| rcupdate.c | ||
| rcutorture.c | ||
| relay.c | ||
| resource.c | ||
| rtmutex-debug.c | ||
| rtmutex-debug.h | ||
| rtmutex-tester.c | ||
| rtmutex.c | ||
| rtmutex.h | ||
| rtmutex_common.h | ||
| rwsem.c | ||
| sched.c | ||
| seccomp.c | ||
| signal.c | ||
| softirq.c | ||
| softlockup.c | ||
| spinlock.c | ||
| stacktrace.c | ||
| stop_machine.c | ||
| sys.c | ||
| sys_ni.c | ||
| sysctl.c | ||
| time.c | ||
| timer.c | ||
| uid16.c | ||
| unwind.c | ||
| user.c | ||
| wait.c | ||
| workqueue.c | ||