Using delayed-work for tty flip buffers ends up causing us to wait for
the next tick to complete some actions. That's usually not all that
noticeable, but for certain latency-critical workloads it ends up being
totally unacceptable.
As an extreme case of this, passing a token back-and-forth over a pty
will take two ticks per iteration, so even just a thousand iterations
will take 8 seconds assuming a common 250Hz configuration.
Avoiding the whole delayed work issue brings that ping-pong test-case
down to 0.009s on my machine.
In more practical terms, this latency has been a performance problem for
things like dive computer simulators (simulating the serial interface
using the ptys) and for other environments (Alan mentions a CP/M emulator).
Reported-by: Jef Driesen <jefdriesen@telenet.be>
Acked-by: Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>
Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
There's a small window inside the flush_to_ldisc function,
where the tty is unlocked and calling ldisc's receive_buf
function. If in this window new buffer is added to the tty,
the processing might never leave the flush_to_ldisc function.
This scenario will hog the cpu, causing other tty processing
starving, and making it impossible to interface the computer
via tty.
I was able to exploit this via pty interface by sending only
control characters to the master input, causing the flush_to_ldisc
to be scheduled, but never actually generate any output.
To reproduce, please run multiple instances of following code.
- SNIP
#define _XOPEN_SOURCE
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int i, slave, master = getpt();
char buf[8192];
sprintf(buf, "%s", ptsname(master));
grantpt(master);
unlockpt(master);
slave = open(buf, O_RDWR);
if (slave < 0) {
perror("open slave failed");
return 1;
}
for(i = 0; i < sizeof(buf); i++)
buf[i] = rand() % 32;
while(1) {
write(master, buf, sizeof(buf));
}
return 0;
}
- SNIP
The attached patch (based on -next tree) fixes this by checking on the
tty buffer tail. Once it's reached, the current work is rescheduled
and another could run.
Signed-off-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: stable <stable@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
The tty code should be in its own subdirectory and not in the char
driver with all of the cruft that is currently there.
Based on work done by Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.cz>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Linus Torvalds
Jiri Olsa
Greg Kroah-Hartman