Re: [PATCH 06/14] sysfs: Rewrite sysfs_get_dentry

[ebiederm-aS9lmoZGLiVWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org (Eric W. Biederman)]

Tejun Heo <htejun-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> writes:

> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 08:34:47PM +0900, Tejun Heo wrote:
>> > If sysfs_mutex nested the other way things would be easier,
>> > and we could grab all of the i_mutexes we wanted.  I wonder if we can
>> > be annoying in sysfs_lookup and treat that as the lock inversion
>> > case using mutex_trylock etc.  And have sysfs_mutex be on the
>> > outside for the rest of the cases?
>> 
>> The problem with treating sysfs_lookup as inversion case is that vfs
>> layer grabs i_mutex outside of sysfs_lookup.  Releasing i_mutex from
>> inside sysfs_lookup would be a hacky layering violation.
>> 
>> Then again, the clean up which can come from the new sysfs_looukp_dentry
>> is very significant.  I'll think about it a bit more.
>
> How about something like this?  __sysfs_get_dentry() never creates any
> dentry, it just looks up existing ones.  sysfs_get_dentry() calls
> __sysfs_get_dentry() and if it fails, it builds a path string and look
> up using regular vfs_path_lookup().  Once in the creation path,
> sysfs_get_dentry() is allowed to fail, so allocating path buf is fine.
>
> It still needs to retry when vfs_path_lookup() returns -ENOENT or the
> wrong dentry but things are much simpler now.  It doesn't violate any
> VFS locking rule while maintaining all the benefits of
> sysfs_get_dentry() cleanup.
>
> Something like LOOKUP_KERNEL is needed to ignore security checks;
> otherwise, we'll need to resurrect lookup_one_len_kern() and open code
> look up.
>
> The patch is on top of all your patches and is in barely working form.

Thanks.  I need to look some more.  I've got a case where __sysfs_get_dentry
called from sysfs_drop_dentry is not successfully walking of the sysfs_dirent
tree to the initial root directory.  (This is with deleted sysfs_dirents but
that expected from the context).

I haven't yet had a chance to dig in and see what is going on yet.

Your patch doesn't touch that part of my logic so I don't know yet what
is going on.

Eric