With CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC turned off i was getting sporadic failures in
the locking self-test:
------------>
| Locking API testsuite:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| spin |wlock |rlock |mutex | wsem | rsem |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A-A deadlock: ok | ok | ok | ok | ok | ok |
A-B-B-A deadlock: ok | ok | ok | ok | ok | ok |
A-B-B-C-C-A deadlock: ok | ok | ok | ok | ok | ok |
A-B-C-A-B-C deadlock: ok | ok | ok | ok | ok | ok |
A-B-B-C-C-D-D-A deadlock: ok |FAILED| ok | ok | ok | ok |
A-B-C-D-B-D-D-A deadlock: ok | ok | ok | ok | ok | ok |
A-B-C-D-B-C-D-A deadlock: ok | ok | ok | ok | ok |FAILED|
after much debugging it turned out to be caused by accidental chain-hash
key collisions. The current hash is:
where MAX_LOCKDEP_KEYS_BITS is 11. This hash is pretty good as it will
shift by 5 bits in every iteration, where every new ID 'mixed' into the
hash would have up to 11 bits. But because there was a 6 bits overlap
between subsequent IDs and their high bits tended to be similar, there was
a chance for accidental chain-hash collision for a low number of locks
held.
This keeps the hash perfect up to 5 locks held, but even above that the
hash is still good because 11 bits is a relative prime to the total 64
bits, so a complete match will only occur after 64 held locks (which doesnt
happen in Linux). Even after 5 locks held, entropy of the 5 IDs mixed into
the hash is already good enough so that overlap doesnt generate a colliding
hash ID.