Re: [PATCH 0/8] nfsd4: keep the client from expiring while in use by nfs41 compounds

J. Bruce Fields
2010-05-11T16:05:46Z

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:39:25AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:27:27AM +0300, Benny Halevy wrote:
> > On May. 10, 2010, 22:01 +0300, "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@citi.umich.edu> wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 05:15:43PM +0300, Benny Halevy wrote:
> > >> On May. 09, 2010, 19:55 +0300, "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@citi.umich.edu> wrote:
> > >>> On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 09:30:31AM +0300, Benny Halevy wrote:
> > >>>> Correct. The intentions are:
> > >>>> 1. Make the laundromat process ignore clients that are in
> > >>>> use by a 4.1 session.
> > >>>> 2. Renew the client when the compound ends, rather than when it begins.
> > >>>> 3. Unhash the client when it's expired explicitly but don't destroy it
> > >>>> until there's no reference to it.
> > >>> OK. My one slight worry there is to make sure that code getting a
> > >>> pointer to a client through a sessionid won't inadvertently assume it's
> > >>> still hashed.
> > >> That's a good point.
> > >> In fact, the client should not be renewed when the compound is done
> > >> if it was already explicitly expired.
> > >
> > > Hm, and we've still got a lot of renew_client()'s sprinkled around that
> > > will try to add the expired client back to client_lru.
> > >
> >
> > For that I've already have a fix in my branch to not renew the client
> > if it's marked as expired (cl_time == 0).
>
> OK.
>
> > >> Another way to deal with this which may be safer but is less optimal
> > >> is to keep only the sessionid and look it up on each use. Then, using
> > >> it while holding the state lock will make sure it's valid when used.
> > >
> > > That seems overkill. Instead of making ops look up the sessionid from
> > > state each time I guess we could have a revalidate_sessionid() that
> > > checked the associated client to see if it was still good.
> >
> > Yeah. Let me see if this is a quick fix and if so I'll send it as part
> > of version 2 of this patchset, otherwise I'll send it as is.
> >
> > > If we continue to reduce the scope of the state lock, isn't that going
> > > to be a pain, though? Will we end up having to do that sort of
> > > revalidation every time we drop the state lock and reacquire it?
> >
> > It's very little pain, just verifying that cl_time != 0.
>
> It's not the trouble of the revalidation I worry about, so much as a)
> remembering to do it every time, and b) always being in a position to
> return an error if it fails.
>
> For now it doesn't seem like a problem, so OK. We can always reconsider
> if it turns out to be.
>
> > > Perhaps the simplest would be to make the clientid-destroyer wait; it
> > > could set some sort of CLIENTID_DEAD flag on the client, wait for a
> > > reference count to go to zero, then destroy the client.
> > >
> >
> > I'm not sure about this. Setting this flag is equivalent
> > to what I propose to do today (with marking the client as expired AND
> > unhashing it) as you want to prevent any more references to it.
> >
> > The question is more about the semantics of the operation that explicitly
> > destroys the old client, e.g. EXCHANGE_ID or DESTROY_SESSION.
> > Can the client tolerate responses for the old clientid/sessionid
> > after the client-destroying operation has succeeded?
>
> I can't see what would give the client to expect any defined behavior

(Sorry, I meant to say "would give the client the right to expect...",
or words to that effect.)

--b.

> for a compound executed concurrently with an explicit destruction of the
> associated clientid.
>
> > > Then other code would be guaranteed that nothing will change underneath
> > > them as long as they hold either the state lock or a reference to a
> > > session.
> > >
> > > So hopefully we'd only need worry about client shutdown in well-defined
> > > places:
> > > - when put()'ing a session, to check whether the client
> > > is ready to be destroyed now.
> >
> > That's in v2.
> >
> > > - when looking up a session, in which case we should check
> > > whether the client is dead and fail the lookup?
> >
> > If the client is dead we won't find the sessionid as we unhash the session
> > structure atomically with the client so that isn't an issue so that's also
> > dealt with in v2.
>
> OK, thanks.
>
> --b.