Re: Hang due to nfs letting tasks freeze with locked inodes

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Fri 08-07-16 08:51:54, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-07-08 at 14:22 +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
[...]
> > Apart from alternative Dave was mentioning in other email, what is the
> > point to use freezable wait from this path in the first place?
> > 
> > nfs4_handle_exception does nfs4_wait_clnt_recover from the same path and
> > that does wait_on_bit_action with TASK_KILLABLE so we are waiting in two
> > different modes from the same path AFAICS. There do not seem to be other
> > callers of nfs4_delay outside of nfs4_handle_exception. Sounds like
> > something is not quite right here to me. If the nfs4_delay did regular
> > wait then the freezing would fail as well but at least it would be clear
> > who is the culrprit rather than having an indirect dependency.
> 
> The codepaths involved there are a lot more complex than that
> unfortunately.
> 
> nfs4_delay is the function that we use to handle the case where the
> server returns NFS4ERR_DELAY. Basically telling us that it's too busy
> right now or has some transient error and the client should retry after
> a small, sliding delay.
> 
> That codepath could probably be made more freezer-safe. The typical
> case however, is that we've sent a call and just haven't gotten a
> reply. That's the trickier one to handle.

Why using a regular non-freezable wait would be a problem?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs