Re: allowing for a completely cached umount(2) pathwalk

[Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 03:57:34PM +0000, Trond Myklebust wrote:

> > 
> > Being able to convert into an O_PATH descriptor gives you more options than just unmounting. It should allow you to syncfs() before unmounting. It should allow you to call open_tree() so you can manipulate the filesystem that is no longer accessible by path walk (e.g. so you can bind it elsewhere or move it).
> > 
> 
> One more thing it might allow us to do, which I’ve been wanting for a while in NFS: allow us to flip the mount type from being “hard” to “soft” before doing the lazy unmount, so that any application that might still retry I/O after the call to umount_begin() completes will start timing out with an I/O error, and free up the resources it might otherwise hold forever.
> 

s/lazy/forced/, surely?  Confused...

Note, BTW, that hard vs. soft is a property of fs instance; if you have
it present elsewhere in the mount tree, flipping it would affect all
such places.  I don't see any good way to make it a per-mount thing, TBH...