Re: [GIT PULL] overlay filesystem v25

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 11:53:52AM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:

> Yes, but it's not about race with copy-up (which the ovl_path_upper()
> protects against), but race of two fsync calls with each other.  If
> there's no synchronization between them, then that od->upperfile does
> indeed count as lockless access, no matter that the assignment was
> done under lock.

	p = global;
	if (!p) {	// outside of lock
		p = alloc();
		grab lock
		if (!global) {
			global = p;
		} else {
			destroy(p);
			p = global;
		}
		drop lock
	}
is a very common pattern, especially if you look for cases when lock is
a spinlock and allocation is blocking (in those cases you'll often see
destroy() part done after dropping the lock; that's where what I fucked up in
what I'd originally pushed.  And it wasn't even needed - fput() under
->i_mutex is OK...)