Re: [git pull] vfs.git spurious ENOTDIR fix

Hugh Dickins
2015-08-02T18:54:12Z

On Sat, 1 Aug 2015, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > (I don't actually understand why the clearing of DCACHE_ENTRY_TYPE in
> > dentry_iput() is not of continuing concern; but don't worry, there's
> > plenty I don't understand - so long as you're both satisfied that
> > it's not a concern, no need to persuade me.)
>
> So dentry_iput() is only called as the dentry is being thrown away,
> and is stale.
>
> Yes, such a stale dentry can be seen by an RCU lookup, but the RCU
> lookups should always revalidate things after the lookup, so it
> shouldn't matter. The problem here was that there was a missing
> revalidate of the RCU lookup for an error case, so the error that
> _should_ have been a harmless race that got handled later by the
> proper validation instead turned into a real user-visible error.

Thank you both for leading me through that: I really should have
rechecked the sequence count invalidation in the source for myself
(I had a wrong picture of it in my head), before inserting that
parenthesis and taking your time over it; but had been in a hurry
to get a response back.

>
> But we didn't use to clear the flags in dentry_iput, so before things
> generally "happened to work" anyway, because this rare error case
> didn't actually ever trigger in the first place.
>
> (And I still don't think we necessarily *should* clear the flags in
> dentry_iput(), but it really shouldn't be a correctness issue)
>
> > Do we have any idea why a bug introduced in v3.13 should only now
> > stand out, both for Dominique and for me? Has the RCU lookup somehow
> > become much more effective recently?
>
> So I do think that the clearing of the dentry flags exposed a
> situation that was harder to hit before.

Right, that does indeed make sense of why it appeared now.

I cannot actually report success from yesterday's testing, since
it hung after 20 hours for, I believe, the same unrelated reason
that I ran into before.

I mentioned jbd2 last time, but I doubt that's at fault: it's almost
certainly an issue with recent vmscan changes and/or recent loop
changes - the business of page reclaim waiting on page writeback
has always been tricky and fragile and deadlock-prone, the more
so when loop is involved: probably the balance has got shifted
slightly by recent changes, I'll look into it (but definitely
not rc5 material).

Thanks,
Hugh