Re: [RFC] Reinstate NFS exportability for JFFS2.

J. Bruce Fields
2008-05-02T14:08:17Z

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 12:37:18PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 11:38 +1000, Neil Brown wrote:
> > Why is there a deadlock here?
>
> Many file systems have their own locking, and lookup() can end up trying
> to re-take a lock which readdir() is already holding. In the JFFS2 case,
> it's the fs-internal inode mutex, which is required because the garbage
> collector can't use i_mutex for lock ordering reasons.
>
> See also the readdir implementation and surrounding comments in
> fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_file.c -- and the way GFS2 uses
> gfs2_glock_is_locked_by_me() to avoid the deadlock.
>
> The annoying thing is that JFFS2 doesn't even _implement_ i_generation,
> so you get no more useful information out of the lookup() call anyway :)
>
> > Both readdir and lookup are called with i_mutex held on the directory
> > so there should need to do any extra locking (he said, naively). In
> > the readdirplus cases, i_mutex is held across both the readdir and the
> > lookup....
> >
> > One problem with your proposed solution is that filehandles aren't all
> > the same length, so you cannot reliably leave space for them.
>
> Not without moving stuff around during the postprocessing, I suppose.
> Which isn't very pretty -- but it's prettier than some of the hacks we
> have at the moment to avoid the deadlock.

This comes up periodically. It would be great to finally get it fixed.
The last conversation I remember started at about:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=119506226209056&w=2

Summary: one approach would be to define a ->readdirplus() that passes a
dentry to its equivalent of the ->filldir callback. (Christoph points
out that returning a stat struct would be simpler. But unfortunately we
need to check for mountpoints here, so that's not sufficient.)

--b.