Re: RFC: hold i_rwsem until aio completes

Christoph Hellwig
2020-01-15T06:54:11Z

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 10:47:07AM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> It would be helpful if we could also use the same lockdep logic
> for PageLocked. Again, it's a case where returning to userspace with
> PageLock held is fine, because we're expecting an interrupt to come in
> and drop the lock for us.

Yes, this is a very typical pattern for I/O. Besides the page and
buffer head bit locks it also applies to the semaphore in the xfs_buf
structure and probably various other places that currently used hand
crafted or legacy locking primitives to escape lockdep.

> Perhaps the right answer is, from lockdep's point of view, to mark the
> lock as being released at the point where we submit the I/O. Then
> in the completion path release the lock without telling lockdep we
> released it.

That is similar to what the fsfreeze code does, but I don't think it
is very optimal, as misses to track any dependencies after I/O
submission, and at least some of the completions paths do take
locks. But it might be a start.