Re: [PATCH] ext4: fix sleep inside spinlock issue aka #14739

["Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 05:15:53PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > drop i_block_reservation_lock before vfs_dq_reserve_block().
> > this patch fix http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14739
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Dmitry Monakhov <dmonakhov@openvz.org>
>   Sorry if someone already refused this (I didn't follow the previous
> discussion too closely) but: Looking at the code I see no reason why
> ext4_claim_free_blocks needs i_block_reservation_lock. In fact mballoc
> calls this function without the lock. So could not we just compute
> 'total' under the lock, release it, reserve quota and then claim free
> blocks? You'd get rid of undoing the block reservation and obtain quota
> and blocks in the usual order...

The code is protecting i_reserved_meta_blocks. We are recalculating the
the value and need to make sure we don't get the value wrong. I guess
we need to hold i_block_reservation_lock while we recalculate the
meta data block.

-aneesh