Re: [PATCH] sysfs: differentiate between locking links and non-links

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 12:09:33PM +1100, Neil Brown wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>  I've just spent a while sorting out some lockdep complaints triggered
>  by the recent addition of the "s_active" lockdep annotation in sysfs
>   (commit 846f99749ab68bbc7f75c74fec305de675b1a1bf)
> 
>  Some of them are genuine and I have submitted a fix for those.
>  Some are, I think, debatable and I get to that is a minute.  I've
>  submitted a fix for them anyway.
>  But some are to my mind clearly bogus and I'm hoping that can be
>  fixed by the change below (or similar).
>  The 'bogus' ones are triggered by writing to a sysfs attribute file
>  for which the handler tries to delete a symlink from sysfs.
>  This appears to be a recursion on s_active as s_active is held while
>  the handler runs and is again needed to effect the delete.  However
>  as the thing being deleted is a symlink, it is very clearly a
>  different object to the thing triggering the delete, so there is no
>  real loop.
> 
>  The following patch splits the lockdep context in two - one for
>  symlink and one for everything else.  This removes the apparent loop.
>  (An example report can be seen in
>      http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15142).
> 
>  The "debatable" dependency loops happen when writing to one attribute
>  causes a different attribute to be deleted.  In my (md) case this can
>  actually cause a deadlock as both the attributes take the same lock
>  while the handler is running.  This is because deleting the attribute
>  will block until the all accesses of that attribute have completed (I
>  think).
>  However it should be possible to delete a name from sysfs while there
>  are still accesses pending (it works for normal files!!).  So if
>  sysfs could be changed to simply unlink the file and leave deletion to
>  happen when the refcount become zero it would certainly make my life
>  a lot easier, and allow the removal of some ugly code from md.c.
>  I don't know sysfs well enough to suggest a patch though.
> 
> Thanks,
> NeilBrown
> 
> 
> 
> commit 2e502cfe444b68f6ef6b8b2abe83b6112564095b
> Author: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
> Date:   Wed Feb 10 09:43:45 2010 +1100
> 
>     sysfs: differentiate  between locking links and non-links for sysfs
>     
>     symlinks and non-symlink is sysfs are very different.
>     A symlink can never be locked (active) while an attribute
>     modification routine is running.  So removing symlink from an
>     attribute 'store' routine should be permitted without any lockdep
>     warnings.
>     
>     So split the lockdep context for 's_active' in two, one for symlinks
>     and other for everything else.
>     
>     Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>

Nice patch, I'll queue it up for .34.

thanks,

greg k-h