BUG/MEDIUM: debug: close a possible race between thread dump and panic()
The rework of the thread dumping mechanism in 2.8 with commit
9a6ecbd590
("MEDIUM: debug: simplify the thread dump mechanism") opened a small
race, which is that a thread in the process of dumping other ones may
block the other one from panicing while it's looping at the end of
ha_thread_dump_fill(), or any other sequence involving the currently
dumped one.
This was emphasized in 3.1 with commit
148eb5875f ("DEBUG: wdt: better
detect apparently locked up threads and warn about them") that allowed
to emit warnings about long-stuck threads, because in this case, what
happens is that sometimes a thread starts to emit a warning (or a set
of warnings), and while the warning is being awaited for, a panic
finally happens and interrupts either the dumping thread, which never
finishes and waits for the target's pointer to become NULL which will
never happen since it was supposed to do it itself, or the currently
dumped thread which could wait for the dumping thread to become ready
while this one has not released the former.
In order to address this, first we now make sure never to dump a thread
that is already in the process of dumping another one. We're adding a
new thread flag to know this situation, that is set in ha_thread_dump_fill()
and cleared in ha_thread_dump_done(). And similarly, we don't trigger
the watchdog on a thread waiting for another one to finish its dump,
as it's likely a case of warning (and maybe even a panic) that makes
them wait for each other and we don't want such cases to be reentrant.
Finally, we check in the main polling loop that the flag never accidentally
leaked (e.g. wrong flag manipulation) as this would be difficult to spot
with bad consequences.
This should be backported at least to 2.8, and should resolve github
issue #2860. Thanks to Chris Staite for the very informative backtrace
that exhibited the problem.