Re: [PATCH 3/4] NFS: avoid deadlocks with loop-back mounted NFS filesystems.

[NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>]

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On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 08:39:39 -0400 Anna Schumaker <Anna.Schumaker@netapp.com>
wrote:

> On 09/16/2014 01:31 AM, NeilBrown wrote:
> > Support for loop-back mounted NFS filesystems is useful when NFS is
> > used to access shared storage in a high-availability cluster.
> >
> > If the node running the NFS server fails, some other node can mount the
> > filesystem and start providing NFS service.  If that node already had
> > the filesystem NFS mounted, it will now have it loop-back mounted.
> >
> > nfsd can suffer a deadlock when allocating memory and entering direct
> > reclaim.
> > While direct reclaim does not write to the NFS filesystem it can send
> > and wait for a COMMIT through nfs_release_page().
> 
> Is there anything that can be done on the nfsd side to prevent the deadlocks?
> 

I went down that path first and it didn't work out.
Setting PF_FSTRANS in nfsd (when the request comes from localhost) and then
arranging the __GFP_FS is cleared when that flag is set overcomes a number of
possible deadlock sources, but not all.

There are a number of situations where nfsd is waiting on some other thread
(which doesn't have PF_FSTRANS set) and that thread tries to reclaim memory
and hits nfs_release_page().
It was a long and complex patch set, and nobody liked it.
And the common thread was always that it always blocked in nfs_release_page().
So it seemed to make sense to just remove that blockage.

Thanks,
NeilBrown

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