Re: Race condition between "read CFQ stats" and "block device shutdown"

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello, (cc'ing linux-scsi)

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 01:37:51PM -0700, Anatol Pomozov wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 08:45:33AM -0700, Anatol Pomozov wrote:
> >> I am not an expect in block code, so I have a few questions here:
> >>
> >> - are we sure that this operation is atomic? What if blkg->q becomes
> >> dead right after we checked it, and blkg->q->queue_lock got invalid so
> >> we have the same crash as before?
> >
> > request_queue lock switching is something inherently broken in block
> > layer.  It's unsalvageable.
> 
> Fully agree. The problem that request_queue->queue_lock is a shared
> resource that concurrently modified/accessed. In this case (when one
> thread changes, another thread access it) we need synchronization to
> prevent race conditions. So we need a spin_lock to access queue_lock
> spin_lock, otherwise we have a crash like one above...
> 
> >  Maybe we can drop lock switching once blk-mq is fully merged.
> 
> Could you please provide more information about it? What is the timeline?

I have no idea.  Hopefully, not too far out.  Jens would have better
idea.

> If there is an easy way to fix the race condition I would like to
> help. Please give me some pointer what direction I should move.

The first step would be identifying who are actually making use of
lock switching, why and how much difference it would make for them to
not do that.

> PS Just a little bit of context why I care about this bug. We test a
> large farm that actively uses iscsi. We are going to have a lot of
> iscsi device startup/shutdown. I am testing whether this codepath has
> race conditions and I found one above.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun