Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] fs: allow all writers to be frozen

[Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2025 at 04:07:32PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> During freeze/thaw we need to be able to freeze all writers during
> suspend/hibernate. Otherwise tasks such as systemd-journald that mmap a
> file and write to it will not be frozen after we've already frozen the
> filesystem.
> 
> This has some risk of not being able to freeze processes in case a
> process has acquired SB_FREEZE_PAGEFAULT under mmap_sem or
> SB_FREEZE_INTERNAL under some other filesytem specific lock. If the
> filesystem is frozen, a task can block on the frozen filesystem with
> e.g., mmap_sem held. If some other task then blocks on grabbing that
> mmap_sem, hibernation ill fail because it is unable to hibernate a task
> holding mmap_sem. This could be fixed by making a range of filesystem
> related locks use freezable sleeping. That's impractical and not
> warranted just for suspend/hibernate. Assume that this is an infrequent
> problem and we've given userspace a way to skip filesystem freezing
> through a sysfs file.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
> ---
>  include/linux/fs.h | 3 +--
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
> index b379a46b5576..1edcba3cd68e 100644
> --- a/include/linux/fs.h
> +++ b/include/linux/fs.h
> @@ -1781,8 +1781,7 @@ static inline void __sb_end_write(struct super_block *sb, int level)
>  
>  static inline void __sb_start_write(struct super_block *sb, int level)
>  {
> -	percpu_down_read_freezable(sb->s_writers.rw_sem + level - 1,
> -				   level == SB_FREEZE_WRITE);
> +	percpu_down_read_freezable(sb->s_writers.rw_sem + level - 1, true);
>  }

Jan, one more thought about freezability here. We know that there will
can be at least one process during hibernation that ends up generating
page faults and that's systemd-journald. When systemd-sleep requests
writing a hibernation image via /sys/power/ files it will inevitably end
up freezing systemd-journald and it may be generating a page fault with
->mmap_lock held. systemd-journald is now sleeping with
SB_FREEZE_PAGEFAULT and TASK_FREEZABLE. We know this can cause
hibernation to fail. That part is fine. What isn't is that we will very
likely always trigger:

#ifdef CONFIG_LOCKDEP
        /*
         * It's dangerous to freeze with locks held; there be dragons there.
         */
        if (!(state & __TASK_FREEZABLE_UNSAFE))
                WARN_ON_ONCE(debug_locks && p->lockdep_depth);
#endif

with lockdep enabled.

So we really actually need percpu_rswem_read_freezable_unsafe(), i.e.,
TASK_FREEZABLE_UNSAFE.