Re: [PATCH v4] fs/namespace: defer RCU sync for MNT_DETACH umount

Christian Brauner
2025-04-09T16:04:27Z

On Wed, Apr 09, 2025 at 04:25:10PM +0200, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> On 2025-04-09 16:02:29 [+0200], Mateusz Guzik wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 09, 2025 at 03:14:44PM +0200, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> > > One question: Do we need this lazy/ MNT_DETACH case? Couldn't we handle
> > > them all via queue_rcu_work()?
> > > If so, couldn't we have make deferred_free_mounts global and have two
> > > release_list, say release_list and release_list_next_gp? The first one
> > > will be used if queue_rcu_work() returns true, otherwise the second.
> > > Then once defer_free_mounts() is done and release_list_next_gp not
> > > empty, it would move release_list_next_gp -> release_list and invoke
> > > queue_rcu_work().
> > > This would avoid the kmalloc, synchronize_rcu_expedited() and the
> > > special-sauce.
> > >
> >
> > To my understanding it was preferred for non-lazy unmount consumers to
> > wait until the mntput before returning.
> >
> > That aside if I understood your approach it would de facto serialize all
> > of these?
> >
> > As in with the posted patches you can have different worker threads
> > progress in parallel as they all get a private list to iterate.
> >
> > With your proposal only one can do any work.
> >
> > One has to assume with sufficient mount/unmount traffic this can
> > eventually get into trouble.
>
> Right, it would serialize them within the same worker thread. With one
> worker for each put you would schedule multiple worker from the RCU
> callback. Given the system_wq you will schedule them all on the CPU
> which invokes the RCU callback. This kind of serializes it, too.
>
> The mntput() callback uses spinlock_t for locking and then it frees
> resources. It does not look like it waits for something nor takes ages.
> So it might not be needed to split each put into its own worker on a
> different CPU… One busy bee might be enough ;)

Unmounting can trigger very large number of mounts to be unmounted. If
you're on a container heavy system or services that all propagate to
each other in different mount namespaces mount propagation will generate
a ton of umounts. So this cannot be underestimated.

If a mount tree is wasted without MNT_DETACH it will pass UMOUNT_SYNC to
umount_tree(). That'll cause MNT_SYNC_UMOUNT to be raised on all mounts
during the unmount.

If a concurrent path lookup calls legitimize_mnt() on such a mount and
sees that MNT_SYNC_UMOUNT is set it will discount as it know that the
concurrent unmounter hold the last reference and it __legitimize_mnt()
can thus simply drop the reference count. The final mntput() will be
done by the umounter.

The synchronize_rcu() call in namespace_unlock() takes care that the
last mntput() doesn't happen until path walking has dropped out of RCU
mode.

Without it it's possible that a non-MNT_DETACH umounter gets a spurious
EBUSY error because a concurrent lazy path walk will suddenly put the
last reference via mntput().

I'm unclear how that's handled in whatever it is you're proposing.