Re: SLUB defrag pull request?

[Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 02:53:40PM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > Case below was brainfart, please ignore.  But that doesn't really
> > help: the VFS assumes that you cannot umount while there are busy
> > dentries/inodes.  Usually it works this way: VFS first gets vfsmount
> > ref, then gets dentry ref, and releases them in the opposite order.
> > And umount is not allowed if vfsmount has a non-zero refcount (it's a
> > bit more complicated, but the essense is the same).
> 
> The dentries that we get a ref on are candidates for removal. Their lifetime
> is limited. Unmounting while we are trying to remove dentries/inodes results
> in two mechanisms removing dentries/inodes.
> 
> If we have obtained a reference then invalidate_list() will return the number
> of busy inodes which would trigger the printk in generic_shutdown_super(). But
> these are inodes currently being reclaimed by slab defrag. Just waiting a bit
> would remedy the situation.
> 
> We would need some way to make generic_shutdown_super() wait until slab defrag
> is finished.

Seems to me that prune_dcache() handles this case by holding the sb->s_umount
semaphore while pruning. The same logic applies here, right?

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com