Re: [patch] stop inotify from sending random DELETE_SELF event under load

John McCutchan
2005-09-20T03:50:11Z

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 04:31 +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 06:37:43PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, John McCutchan wrote:
> > >
> > > Below is a patch that fixes the random DELETE_SELF events when the
> > > system is under load. The problem is that the DELETE_SELF event is sent
> > > from dentry_iput, which is called in two code paths,
> > >
> > > 1) When a dentry is being deleted
> > > 2) When the dcache is being pruned.
> >
> > No no.
> >
> > The problem is that you put the "fsnotify_inoderemove(inode);" in the
> > wrong place, and I and Al never noticed.
> >
> > iput() doesn't have anything to do with delete at all, and adding a flag
> > to it would be wrong. The inode may stay around _after_ the unlink() for
> > as long as it has users (or much longer, if you have hardlinks ;).
> >
> > You should probably move the "fsnotify_inoderemove(inode);" call into
> > generic_delete_inode() instead, just after "security_inode_delete()". No
> > new flags, just a new place.
> >
> > (Oh, I think you need to add it to "hugetlbfs_delete_inode()" too).
> >
> > There's still a potential problem there: some network filesystems seem to
> > use "generic_delete_inode()" as their "drop_inode" thing. Which may mean
> > that you get spurious delete messages when the reference is dropped. I
> > don't see how to avoid that, though - we fundamentally don't _know_ when
> > the inode actually gets deleted.
> >
> > Al, do you have any comments? Anything stupid I missed?
>
> One fundamentally stupid thing is exposing to userland events that
> are none of its fscking business. Link removal - sure. Last link
> removal - perhaps, but that's not obvious; in any case it should be
> tied to notification of link removal. But inode getting freed or
> last dentry going away is none of the userland concern.

I just thought I should clarify exactly when we want to send the
DELETE_SELF event to user space:

A path which points to inode X has been deleted.

--
John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>