[PATCH 0/2] kdump: Enter 2nd kernel with BSP for enabling multiple CPUs

[HATAYAMA Daisuke]

Currently, booting up 2nd kernel with multiple CPUs fails in most
cases since it enters 2nd kernel with AP if the crash happens on the
AP. The problem is to signal startup IPI from AP to BSP. Typical
result of the operation I saw is the machine hanging during the 2nd
kernel boot.

To solve this issue, always enter 2nd kernel with BSP. To do this, I
modify logic for shooting down CPUs. I use simple existing logic only
in this mechanism, not complicating crash path to machine_kexec().

I did stress tests about 100 in total on the processors below:

  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7- 4820  @ 2.00GHz
  Socket x 4, Core x 8, Thread x 16 (160 LCPUS in total)

  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7- 8870  @ 2.40GHz
  Socket x 8, Core x 10, Thread x 20 (64 LCPUS in total)

* Motivation of enabling multiple CPUs on the 2nd kernel

This patch is aimed at doing parallel compression on the 2nd
kernel. The machine that has more than tera bytes memory requires
several hours to generate crash dump.

There are several ways to reduce generation time of crash time, but
they have different pros and cons:

  Fast I/O devices
    pros
      - Can obtain high-speed stably
    cons
      - Big financial cost for good performance I/O devices. It's
        difficult financially to prepare these for all environments as
        dump devices.

  Filtering
    pros
      - No financial cost.
      - Large reduction of crash dump size

    cons
      - Some data is definitely lost. So, we cannot use this on some
        situations:

        1) High availability configuration where application triggers
        OS to crash and users want to debug the application later by
        retrieving the application's user process image from the
        system's crash dump.

        2) KVM virtualization configuration where KVM host machine
        contains KVM guest machine images as user processes.

        3) Page cache is needed for debugging filesystem related bugs.

  Compression
    pros
      - No financial cost.
      - No data lost.

    cons
      - Compression doesn't always reduce crash dump size.
      - take heavy CPU time. Slow if CPU is weak in speed.

Machines with large memory tend to have a lot of CPUs. Parallel
compression is sutable for parallel processing. My goal is to make
compression as for free as possible.

* TODO

  - Extend 512MB limit of reserved memory size for 2nd kernel for
    multiple CPUs.

  - Intel microcode patch loading on the 2nd kenrel is slow for the
    2nd and later CPUs: about one or more minutes per one CPU.

  - There are a limited number of irq vectors for TLB flush IPI on
    x86_64: 32 for recent 3.x kernels and 8 for around 2.6.x
    kernels. So compression doesn't scale if a lot of page reclaim
    happens when reading kernel image larger than memory. Special
    handling without page cache could be applicable to parallel dump
    mechanism, but more investigation is needed.

---

HATAYAMA Daisuke (2):
      Enter 2nd kernel with BSP
      Introduce crash ipi helpers to wait for APs to stop


 arch/x86/include/asm/reboot.h |    4 +++
 arch/x86/kernel/crash.c       |   15 +++++++++-
 arch/x86/kernel/reboot.c      |   63 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
 3 files changed, 62 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-)

-- 
HATAYAMA Daisuke