Re: [PATCH v4 00/54] tree-in-dcache stuff

Al Viro
2026-01-31T01:06:37Z

On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 04:14:48PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 at 15:55, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > So we have something that does O_NDELAY opens of ep0 *and* does not retry on
> > EAGAIN?
> >
> > How lovely...
>
> Actually, I think that is pretty normal behavior.
>
> Generally, O_NDELAY and friends should *NOT* turn locks into trylocks
> - because user space has no sane way to deal with kernel lock issues,
> and user space simply shouldn't care.
>
> So O_NDELAY should be about avoiding IO, not about avoiding perfectly
> normal locks.
>
> Of course, that horrendous driver locking is broken, since it holds
> the lock over IO, so that driver basically conflates IO and locking,
> and that's arguably the fundamental problem here.
>
> But I suspect that for this case, we should just pass in zero to
> ffs_mutex_lock() on open, and say that the O_NONBLOCK flag is purely
> about the subsequent IO, not about the open() itself.
>
> That is, after all, how the driver used to work.

I'd rather go for a spinlock there, protecting these FFS_DEACTIVATED
transitions; let me try and put together something along those lines.
Matter of fact, I would drop the atomics for ->opened completely
and do all changes under the same spinlock - it's really just
->open() and ->release(). Simpler that way...

The shitty part is that ->set_alt() thing and its callers seems to
be written in assumption that it can come from an interrupt, so we'd
need spin_lock_irq() in open/release and spin_lock_irqsave() in
set_alt/disable...

Another fun part is that we need a barrier on transition from
FFS_CLOSING in ffs_data_reset() - right now it's not even the last
assignment in there. Same spinlock would solve that - screw explicit
barriers, it's _not_ a hot path and the locking is convoluted enough
as it is.