Re: [PATCH 08/12] superblock: introduce per-sb cache shrinker infrastructure

Al Viro
2011-06-04T14:24:52Z

On Sat, Jun 04, 2011 at 03:19:40PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> > The iprune_sem removal is fine as soon as you have a per-sb shrinker
> > for the inodes which keeps an active reference on the superblock until
> > all the inodes are evicted.
>
> I really don't like that. Stuff keeping active refs, worse yet doing that
> asynchronously... Shrinkers should *not* do that. Just grab a passive
> ref (i.e. bump s_count), try grab s_umount (shared) and if that thing still
> has ->s_root while we hold s_umount, go ahead. Unregister either at the
> end of generic_shutdown_super() or from deactivate_locked_super(), between
> the calls of ->kill_sb() and put_filesystem().

PS: shrinkers should not acquire active refs; more specifically, they should
not _drop_ active refs, lest they end up dropping the last active one and
trigger unregistering a shrinker for superblock in question. From inside of
->shrink(), with shrinker_rwsem held by caller. Deadlock...