Re: [PATCH v2] fuse: In fuse_flush only wait if someone wants the return code

Tycho Andersen
2022-09-30T16:10:20Z

On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 04:41:37PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Sept 2022 at 16:01, Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.pizza> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 03:35:16PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > On Thu, 29 Sept 2022 at 18:40, Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.pizza> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > If a fuse filesystem is mounted inside a container, there is a problem
> > > > during pid namespace destruction. The scenario is:
> > > >
> > > > 1. task (a thread in the fuse server, with a fuse file open) starts
> > > > exiting, does exit_signals(), goes into fuse_flush() -> wait
> > >
> > > Can't the same happen through
> > >
> > > fuse_flush -> fuse_sync_writes -> fuse_set_nowrite -> wait
> > >
> > > ?
> >
> > Looks like yes, though I haven't seen this in the wild, I guess
> > because there aren't multiple writers most of the time the user code
> > that causes this.
> >
> > I'm not exactly sure how to fix this. Reading through 3be5a52b30aa
> > ("fuse: support writable mmap"), we don't want to allow multiple
> > writes since that may do allocations, which could cause deadlocks. But
> > in this case we have no reliable way to wait (besides a busy loop, I
> > suppose).
> >
> > Maybe just a check for PF_EXITING and a pr_warn() with "echo 1 >
> > /sys/fs/fuse/connections/$N/abort" or something?
>
> AFAICS it should be perfectly normal (and trivial to trigger) for an
> exiting process to have its dirty pages flushed through fuse_flush().

Agreed.

> We could do that asynchronously as well, generally there are no
> promises about dirty pages being synced as part of the process exiting
> . But ordering between dirty page flushing and sending the FUSE_FLUSH
> request should be kept. Which needs more complexity, unfortunately.

How can we wait in fuse_set_nowrite()? Or are you suggesting we just
do a fuse_flush_writepages() in the async part and hope for the best?

Thanks,

Tycho