Re: [RFC][PATCH] Btrfs: fix deadlock due to unsubmitted

[Chris Mason <chris.mason@fusionio.com>]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 03:12:07AM -0700, Miao Xie wrote:
> The deadlock problem happened when running fsstress(a test program in LTP).
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
>  # mkfs.btrfs -b 100M <partition>
>  # mount <partition> <mnt>
>  # <Path>/fsstress -p 3 -n 10000000 -d <mnt>
> 
> The reason is:
> btrfs_direct_IO()
>  |->do_direct_IO()
>      |->get_page()
>      |->get_blocks()
>      |	 |->btrfs_delalloc_resereve_space()
>      |	 |->btrfs_add_ordered_extent() -------	Add a new ordered extent
>      |->dio_send_cur_page(page0) --------------	We didn't submit bio here
>      |->get_page()
>      |->get_blocks()
> 	 |->btrfs_delalloc_resereve_space()
> 	     |->flush_space()
> 		 |->btrfs_start_ordered_extent()
> 		     |->wait_event() ----------	Wait the completion of
> 						the ordered extent that is
> 						mentioned above
> 
> But because we didn't submit the bio that is mentioned above, the ordered
> extent can not complete, we would wait for its completion forever.
> 
> There are two methods which can fix this deadlock problem:
> 1. submit the bio before we invoke get_blocks()
> 2. reserve the space before we do dio
> 
> Though the 1st is the simplest way, we need modify the code of VFS, and it
> is likely to break contiguous requests, and introduce performance regression
> for the other filesystems.
> 
> So we have to choose the 2nd way.

The 3rd option is to have get_blocks return -EAGAIN to the direct-io.c
code and let the higher levels submit the bios they have built.

Josef will probably go for option #4, which is dropping the generic code
completely and doing it all ourselves.

But I do like your approach, it makes sense here.

-chris