When the kernel boots from kexec, the EPC pages may have a stale state. The kernel sanitizes all EPC pages to reset them to a clean state before their first use in any enclave. The EPC size could be several GBs and resetting them could take a significant amount of time. Because of that, the kernel performs the reset in a loop through a kernel thread ksgxd() at early boot, and there's a cond_resched() after resetting each EPC page. This is fine in most cases, but becomes a problem when there's other kernel code waiting for an RCU-Tasks grace period but the cond_resched() in ksgxd() never triggers rescheduling. Because cond_resched() doesn't report a quiescent state when it doesn't trigger rescheduling, the thread that is waiting for an RCU-Tasks grace period will wait until all EPC pages are reset. For instance, BPF LSM subsystem can invoke synchronize_rcu_tasks() at kernel boot time. A VM with a large EPC assigned and BPF LSM enabled can take a long time to boot, with a call trace triggered: rcu_tasks_wait_gp: rcu_tasks grace period number 1 (since boot) is 130631 jiffies old. INFO: task systemd:1 blocked for more than 122 seconds. ... task:systemd state:D stack:0 pid:1 tpid:1 ppid:0 flags:0x00000002 Call Trace: ... schedule_timeout+0x157/0x170 wait_for_completion+0x88/0x150 __wait_rcu_gp+0x17e/0x190 synchronize_rcu_tasks_generic+0x64/0x60 ... synchronize_rcu_tasks+0x15/0x20 register_ftrace_direct+0x31f/0x350 ... bpf_trampoline_link_prog+0x33/0x60 bpf_tracing_prog_attach+0x3c5/0x5f0 Replace cond_resched() with cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() which explicitly reports quiescent state regardless of whether actual rescheduling is triggered. Resetting all EPC pages in ksgxd() isn't performance critical so the extra cost of cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() isn't a problem. Tests showed this reduced the VM kernel boot time from ~50s to ~700ms. Fixes: e7e0545299d8 ("x86/sgx: Initialize metadata for Enclave Page Cache (EPC) sections") Suggested-by: Kai Huang Co-developed-by: Fan Du Signed-off-by: Fan Du Signed-off-by: Jun Miao Tested-by: Challvy Tee Reviewed-by: Kai Huang Link: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/40423 --- v1 -> v2: - Clarify the RCU Tasks stall root cause. - Use cond_resched_rcu_qs() following the Kai`s suggestion. v2 -> v3: - cee439398933 ("rcu: Rename cond_resched_rcu_qs() to cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs()") v3 -> v4: - Trim down/rewrite changelog following Kai`s suggestion. v4 -> v5: - Change the title, not state the problem directly - Corrected spelling and grammatical errors by Kai - Add "Reviewed-by: Kai Huang" --- arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/main.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/main.c b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/main.c index 4505f808af5e..7d2f57663177 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/main.c +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/sgx/main.c @@ -106,7 +106,7 @@ static unsigned long __sgx_sanitize_pages(struct list_head *dirty_page_list) left_dirty++; } - cond_resched(); + cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(); } list_splice(&dirty, dirty_page_list); -- 2.32.0