work_on_cpu(): rewrite it to create a kernel thread on demand

Impact: circular locking bugfix

The various implemetnations and proposed implemetnations of work_on_cpu()
are vulnerable to various deadlocks because they all used queues of some
form.

Unrelated pieces of kernel code thus gained dependencies wherein if one
work_on_cpu() caller holds a lock which some other work_on_cpu() callback
also takes, the kernel could rarely deadlock.

Fix this by creating a short-lived kernel thread for each work_on_cpu()
invokation.

This is not terribly fast, but the only current caller of work_on_cpu() is
pci_call_probe().

It would be nice to find some other way of doing the node-local
allocations in the PCI probe code so that we can zap work_on_cpu()
altogether.  The code there is rather nasty.  I can't think of anything
simple at this time...

Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
1 file changed