Re: [PATCH 1/5] locking: Add rwsem_is_write_locked()

Matthew Wilcox
2023-09-07T19:20:37Z

On Thu, Sep 07, 2023 at 09:08:10PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2023 at 06:47:01PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) wrote:
> > Several places want to know whether the lock is held by a writer, instead
> > of just whether it's held. We can implement this for both normal and
> > rt rwsems. RWSEM_WRITER_LOCKED is declared in rwsem.c and exposing
> > it outside that file might tempt other people to use it, so just use
> > a comment to note that's what the 1 means, and help anybody find it if
> > they're looking to change the implementation.
>
> I'm presuming this is deep in a callchain where they know they hold the
> lock, but they lost in what capacity?

No, it's just assertions. You can see that in patch 3 where it's
used in functions called things like "xfs_islocked".

> In general I strongly dislike the whole _is_locked family, because it
> gives very poorly defined semantics if used by anybody but the owner.
>
> If these new functions are indeed to be used only by lock holders to
> determine what kind of lock they hold, could we please put:
>
> lockdep_assert_held()
>
> in them?

Patch 2 shows it in use in the MM code. We already have a
lockdep_assert_held_write(), but most people don't enable lockdep, so
we also have VM_BUG_ON_MM(!rwsem_is_write_locked(&mm->mmap_lock), mm)
to give us a good assertion when lockdep is disabled.

XFS has a problem with using lockdep in general, which is that a worker
thread can be spawned and use the fact that the spawner is holding the
lock. There's no mechanism for the worker thread to ask "Does struct
task_struct *p hold the lock?".