http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/815639/
Every once in a while when my system is under a bit of stress I see some spammy messages show up in my logs that say: kevent X may have been dropped As far as I can tell these messages aren't terribly useful. The comments around the messages make me think that either workqueues used to work differently or that the original author of the code missed a sublety related to them. The error message appears to predate the git conversion of the kernel so it's somewhat hard to tell. Specifically, workqueues should work like this: A) If a workqueue hasn't been scheduled then schedule_work() schedules it and returns true. B) If a workqueue has been scheduled (but hasn't started) then schedule_work() will do nothing and return false. C) If a workqueue has been scheduled (and has started) then schedule_work() will put it on the queue to run again and return true. Said another way: if you call schedule_work() you can guarantee that at least one full runthrough of the work will happen again. That should mean that the work will get processed and I don't see any reason to think something should be dropped. Reading the comments in in usbnet_defer_kevent() made me think that B) and C) would be treated the same. That is: even if we've started the work and are 99% of the way through then schedule_work() would return false and the work wouldn't be queued again. If schedule_work() really did behave that way then, truly, some amount of work would be lost. ...but it doesn't. NOTE: if somehow these warnings are useful to mean something then perhaps we should change them to make it more obvious. If it's interesting to know when the work is backlogged then we should change the spam to say "warning: usbnet is backlogged". ALSO NOTE: If somehow some of the types of work need to be repeated if usbnet_defer_kevent() is called multiple times then that should be quite easy to accomplish without dropping any work on the floor. We can just keep an atomic count for that type of work and add a loop into usbnet_deferred_kevent().