Re: [Virtio-fs] [PATCH 7/8] virtiofs: Add new notification type FUSE_NOTIFY_LOCK

[Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2021 at 02:55:16PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Sept 2021 at 16:39, Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Add a new notification type FUSE_NOTIFY_LOCK. This notification can be
> > sent by file server to signifiy that a previous locking request has
> > completed and actual caller should be woken up.
> >
> > As of now we don't support blocking variant of posix locks and daemon
> > returns -EOPNOTSUPP. Reason being that it can lead to deadlocks.
> > Virtqueue size is limited and it is possible we fill virtqueue with
> > all the requests of fcntl(F_SETLKW) and wait for reply. And later a
> > subsequent unlock request can't make progress because virtqueue is full.
> > And that means F_SETLKW can't make progress and we are deadlocked.
> >
> > This problem is not limited to posix locks only. I think blocking remote
> > flock and open file description locks should face the same issue. Right
> > now fuse does not support open file description locks, so its not
> > a problem. But fuse/virtiofs does support remote flock and they can use
> > same mechanism too.
> >
> > Use notification queue to solve this problem. After submitting lock
> > request device will send a reply asking requester to wait. Once lock is
> > available, requester will get a notification saying lock is available.
> > That way we don't keep the request virtueue busy while we are waiting for
> > lock and further unlock requests can make progress.
> >
> > When we get a reply in response to lock request, we need a way to know
> > if we need to wait for notification or not. I have overloaded the
> > fuse_out_header->error field. If value is ->error is 1, that's a signal
> > to caller to wait for lock notification. Overloading ->error in this way
> > is not the best way to do it. But I am running out of ideas.
> 
> Since all values besides -511..0 are reserved this seems okay.
> However this needs to be a named value and added to uapi/linux/fuse.h.

Ok, I will define this value and put in uapi/linux/fuse.h. 

Thanks
Vivek